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A  Century  of  French  Fiction 


A  CENTURY 

OF 

FRENCH   FICTION 

BY 

BENJAMIN  W.  WELLS,  Ph.D.  (Harv.) 

PROFESSOR    OF    MODERN    LANGUAGES    IN    THE 
UNIVERSITY    OF    THE    SOUTH 


NEW  YORK 
DODD,  MEAD  AND  COMPANY 

1898 


REESB 

Copyright,  1898, 
By  Dodd,  Mead  and  Company. 


John  Wilson  and  Son,  Cambridge,  U.S.A. 


V1/4f 


Preface 

THIS  book  is  a  study  of  novels,  not  of  novelists. 
It  seeks  to  show  the  development  of  what  has 
come  to  be  the  chief  genre  in  the  most  artistic  of 
European  literatures.  The  limitations  that  this  pur- 
pose involves  are  obvious.  Biography  belongs  here 
only  in  so  far  as  heredity  or  environment  influence 
those  qualities  in  an  author  by  which  he  in  turn  influ- 
ences the  development  of  fiction.  With  some  novel- 
ists, such  as  George  Sand,  these  are  very  significant ; 
with  others,  such  as  Daudet,  they  are  hardly  signifi- 
cant at  all.  The  poems,  dramas,  or  essays  of  novelists 
are  usually  passed  in  silence,  though  they  may  be,  as 
with  Sainte-Beuve,  the  chief  title  to  literary  distinction. 
And  in  regard  to  the  novels  themselves,  this  book  is 
less  concerned  with  what  is  done  than  with  how  it  is 
done ;  it  seeks,  not  to  retell  a  story,  but  to  convey  an 
artistic  impression,  and  in  the  space  that  it  accords  to 
the  115  novelists  and  688  novels  or  short  stories  that 
it  names  it  is  less  influenced  by  an  author's  popularity 
than  by  the  excellence  or  novelty  of  his  technic,  his 
style,  or  his  ideas  of  the  functions,  ethical,  social,  phil- 
osophical, or  artistic,  of  the  novel.  Many  writers  are 
little  read  who  have  been  studied  by  those  who  are 
read  much.     The  former   have  more   interest  to  us 


102929 


vi  Preface 

than  the  latter,  Stendhal  more  than  Ohnet,  the  Gon- 
courts  than  Bourget,  while  writers  who  offer  only 
clever  reflections  of  the  innovating  ideas  of  others  are 
from  our  point  of  view  of  no  interest  at  all.  I  men- 
tion that  I  may  not  seem  to  have  forgotten,  but,  fol- 
lowing Dante's  counsel,  I  "  look  and  pass." 

If,  then,  I  have  given  more  space  to  Loti  or  to 
Chateaubriand  than  to  Hugo  it  is  because  I  think 
them  as  novelists  more  significant  than  he,  though 
their  fiction  be  less  read  and  less  entertaining.  If 
more  than  a  quarter  of  my  book  is  given  to  Balzac  it 
is  because  I  think  that  is  his  proportionate  due.  To 
eight  others  I  have  accorded  separate  studies.  The 
remaining  io6  are  grouped  according  to  the  circum- 
stances of  their  birth  and  education,  for,  as  I  have 
come  to  see  in  the  course  of  this  study,  there  is  a  con- 
nection worth  noting  between  the  political  condition 
of  France  and  the  gestation  of  her  men  of  genius,  a 
certain  family  resemblance  among  the  sons  of  the 
First  Empire,  as  among  those  of  the  Restoration,  of 
the  Bourgeois  Monarchy  and  of  the  Second  Empire. 
Of  course,  as  in  every  large  family,  there  are  eccen- 
trics that  bear  no  marked  likeness  to  their  brothers, 
but  I  trust  this  arrangement  of  heterogeneous  mate- 
rials will  prove  the  most  helpful  and  perspicuous. 

As  my  book  is  intended  for  English  readers  I  have 
translated  all  titles  of  novels,  and  where  there  seemed 
any  possibility  of  misunderstanding  I  have  added  the 
title  in  its  original  French  form,  under  which  alone  it 
appears  in  the  Index.  I  have  read,  so  far  as  was  ne- 
cessary to  my  purpose,  every  novel  mentioned  n  this 


Preface 


Vll 


book.  I  have  taken  notes  of  my  impressions.  I  have 
also  read  such  criticism  of  these  works  as  was  acces- 
sible to  me,  both  in  French  and  English,  note-book  in 
hand.  My  ideas  have  often  been  clarified  or  crystal- 
lized, my  point  of  view  occasionally  modified  by  what 
I  have  read,  but  to  acknowledge  such  debts  in  detail, 
were  it  possible,  would  be  misleading,  for,  if  I  seem  in 
any  case  to  echo  the  opinion  of  another,  it  is  because 
I  have  been  led  by  independent  study  to  share  it. 
What  I  have  taken  consciously  from  others  is  quoted 
by  name  if  the  citation  is  exact,  indefinitely  if  the 
form  is  altered  or  the  thought  modified. 

Two  years  ago  I  published  a  book  on  Modern 
French  Literature,  which  involved  brief  mention  of 
the  present  subject.  That  phrases  of  the  earher 
volume  should  occasionally  recur  in  this  is  perhaps 
inevitable.  The  two  books  are,  however,  distinct  in 
purpose  and  in  method.  Chapter  VIII.  and  portions  of 
Chapter  I.  have  appeared  in  "  The  Sewanee  Review." 
The  origins  of  fiction  in  France,  and  its  history  till  the 
French  Revolution,  I  hope  to  treat  in  another  volume, 
for  which  all  materials  are  well  in  hand. 

I  desire  in  conclusion  to  extend  my  thanks  to  the 
officers  of  the  Boston  Public  Library,  whose  untiring 
courtesy  has  made  this  book  a  possibility,  while  pro- 
viding for  the  author  the  pleasantest  and  the  most 
profitable  of  his  studious  hours. 

BENJAMIN   W.   WELLS. 
University  of  the  South, 
Sewanee,  Tenn. 


Contents 


CHAPTER  PAGE 

I.  Fiction  under   Bonaparte i 

II.  The  Novels  of  Stendhal 30 

III.  The  Fiction  of  the  Romantic  School   .      .        44 >^ 

IV.  Alexandre  Dumas  and  the  Napoleonic  Gen- 

eration        68'~' 

V.  The  Development  of  Balzac 88  **" 

VI.  The  Maturity  of  Balzac 130 

VII.  The  Genius  of  Balzac  .......  165  ""*■ 

VIII.  Prosper  Merimee 187 

IX.  Theophile  Gautier 203  — 

X.  George  Sand    ....  .....  219 

XI.  GusTAVE  Flaubert .  242  — 

XII.  The  Generation  of  the  Restoration      .      .  262  4— 

XIII.  Emile  Zola 283^- 

XIV.  Alphonse  Daudet 305 

XV.  The  Generation  of  Louis  Philippe     .      .     .  326 

XVI.  Guy  de  Maupassant.      .......  348^7* 

XVII.  The  Generation  of  the  Second  Empire  .     .  362 

INDEX 385 


A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

CHAPTER   I 

FICTION   UNDER   BONAPARTE 

THE  nineteenth  century  is  pre-eminently  the  age  of  the 
novel.  What  Voltaire  could  call  the  work  of  one 
writing  with  facility  things  unworthy  to  be  read  by  serious 
minds  has  become  so  predominant  in  France  as  almost  to 
absorb  in  popular  literary  consciousness  all  forms  of  imagi- 
native writing  except  the  dram'a.  This  tendency,  manifest 
at  the  outset  of  the  century,  has  been  accentuated  by  the 
spread  of  superficial  culture,  the  cheapening  in  the  cost  of 
production  of  books,  and  the  readier  means  of  diffusion  by 
post  and  railway.  The  French  newspapers,  too,  by  their 
feuilletons  have  added  greatly  to  the  production  of  fiction, 
though  they  have  tended  to  lower  its  literary  standard.  But 
more  important  perhaps  than  any  of  these  factors  is  that 
with  the  first  year  of  our  century  fiction  begins  to  reflect 
popular  emotions  and  states  of  mind.  The  novel  of  the 
romantic  school  was  to  be  lyric  in  its  style,  personal 
in  its  appeal.  Herein  lies  the  cardinal  importance  of 
Chateaubriand. 

The  century  in  fiction  opens  with  the  publication  of  his 
Atala  in  1801,  followed  in  1802  by  Rene^  both  short  stories 

I 


2  A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

but  of  far-reaching  influence  and  most  characteristic  of  the 
mood  of  the  next  generation  and  of  this  author,  who  was  its 
most  eloquent  representative.  He  was  a  Breton  noble, 
born  at  St.  Malo,  "  within  hearing  of  the  waves  "  as  he  liked 
to  say,  on  the  fourth  of  September,  1768,  the  birth-year  of 
Napoleon,  to  whom  he  was  also  wont  to  take  this  occasion 
to  compare  himself.  Neither  mother  nor  father  seems  to 
have  been  a  wise  or  genial  parent,  and  his  chief  if  not  his 
only  childish  affection  was  for  a  sister,  Lucile,  a  frail,  ner- 
vous invalid,  who  died  young.  The  relation  was  certainly 
morbid,  and  later  in  his  life  Chauteaubriand  was  pleased  to 
surround  it  with  a  sort  of  incestuous  halo  that  he  might  ex- 
plain by  this  aberration  of  youth  the  fascinating  indifference 
that  characterised  his  own  relations  to  women  in  after  years 
and  found  their  fullest  expression  in  his  Ren^,  the  most 
strongly  marked  character,  in  a  sense  we  may  say  the  only 
character,  of  his  fiction. 

He  was  himself  an  intense  and  somewhat  morbid  youth. 
He  passed  his  childhood  in  an  ultra-Catholic  environment, 
listening  to  the  strange  legends  of  the  childlike  Breton  peo- 
ple or  nursing  meditation  by  the  boundless  and  mysterious 
ocean.  As  a  boy  he  went  to  various  schools,  but  all  within 
the  Breton  spell,  and  then  to  the  gloomy  ancestral  castle  of 
Combourg ;  no  wonder  that  his  twentieth  year  found  him 
untaught,  timid,  eager,  and  gloomy,  above  all  dissatisfied 
with  all  that  life  gave  or  promised.  He  was  suffering 
already  from  that  maladie  du  Steele  of  which  it  is  impossible 
not  to  speak  at  some  length  in  judging  Chateaubriand,  but 
which  we  shall  perhaps  treat  more  profitably  if  we  first  trace 
the  course  of  his  life  until,  with  the  fall  of  Napoleon,  the 
man  of  letters  was  absorbed  in  the  politician.  He  tried  to 
go  to  sea  and  got  actually  as  far  as  Brest ;  he  contemplated 


Fiction  under  Bonaparte  3 

suicide ;  then  his  friends  got  him  a  position  in  the  army,  and 
on  the  eve  of  the  Revolution  the  young  man  found  himself 
transported  from  the  solitude  of  ocean  and  forest,  from  the 
most  backward  province  of  France,  to  Paris,  the  focus  of  the 
intellectual  and  political  world. 

The  effect,  as  was  natural,  was  immediate  and  strong. 
Its  literary  significance,  however,  lies  in  the  strength  of  the 
reaction  that  followed  and  in  the  literary  stimulus  that  his 
associations  gave  him.  He  learned  to  know  most  of  the 
chief  writers  of  the  time,  Parny  the  poet.  La  Harpe  the 
critic,  the  two  Ch^niers,  Chamfort  the  acute  philosopher, 
and  most  important  of  all  to  him,  Fontanes,  who  was  the 
discoverer  of  his  genius,  his  unswerving  friend,  and  always 
a  shrewd  adviser.  He  began  intense  though  unsystematic 
studies.  Ignorant  at  twenty,  his  Essay  on  Revolutions 
(1797)  published  at  twenty-nine  shows  a  remarkable  mass 
of  information,  which  indeed  was  never  fully  assimilated. 
But  acquaintance  with  the  great  writings  of  the  century 
aroused  in  him,  as  greatness  always  did,  mingled  admiration 
and  envy.  Could  he  not,  he  seems  to  have  said  to  himself, 
catch  the  imagination  of  Rousseau  and  use  it  to  controvert 
his  ideas  and  so  to  destroy  his  ascendency  ?  Could  he  not 
eclipse  Bernardin  de  St.  Pierre  by  borrowing  his  style  and 
making  it  the  bearer  of  sturdier  thought?  There  remained 
Voltaire,  whose  wit  he  could  not  borrow.  Against  him  and 
his  ideas  he  would  wage  a  moral  war,  and  win  for  himself 
the  mantle  of  Bossuet.  Such  seem  to  have  been  the  lit- 
erary impulses  that  he  gathered  from  four  intoxicating  years. 
Then  in  1791  as  the  clouds  of  revolution  thickened  he  set 
sail  for  America,  where  he  had  a  commission  to  search  for 
the  Northwest  Passage,  obviously  a  mere  pretext.  He 
travelled  more  or  less  widely  in  the  United  States,  met 


4  A   Century  of  French  Fiction 

Washington,  and,  according  to  his  own  account,  which  is 
never  above  suspicion,  saw  Labrador  and  the  Great  Lakes, 
the  prairies  of  what  was  then  Louisiana,  and  the  semi-trop- 
cal  forests  of  Spanish  Florida.  Here  he  might  observe  the 
**  state  of  nature  "  as  Rousseau  had  dreamed  and  Bernardin 
described  it.  Here  the  morbid  imagination  of  his  youth 
was  vivified  by  contact  with  a  primeval  world  and  untutored 
man.  He  was  gone  but  a  year  and  landed  again  in  France 
in  January,  1792,  but  that  year  gave  him  the  scene  and  the 
direct  inspiration  for  the  greater  part  of  his  fiction  and  the 
indirect  inspiration  for  the  rest. 

The  execution  of  Louis  XVL  made  Chateaubriand  an 
emigre ;  he  was  wounded  in  the  expedition  against  Thion- 
ville,  went  to  England  in  1793,  and  remained  there  till  1800. 
It  was  during  this  period  of  exiled  poverty  that  he  wrote 
The  Natchez  J  a.  huge  manuscript  of  2,383  folio  pages,  in 
which  he  strove  to  involve  his  impressions  of  America  and 
of  life.  Of  this  far  the  greater  part  was  not  printed  till 
1826,  but  it  served  as  a  sort  of  storehouse  from  which  he 
drew  successively  A  fa/a  (1801),  I^ene  (1802),  and  con- 
siderable p^s  of  the  Genius  of  Christianity  (1802).  This 
last  lies  outside  our  immediate  field.  Chateaubriand's 
other  contributions  to  fiction  are  The  Martyrs  (les  Mar- 
tyrs, 1809),  and  The  Last  Abencerage  (Aventure  du  dernier 
Abenc^rage,  1826),  written  about  the  same  time.  To 
these  last  works  he  brought  the  added  experience  of  two 
years  of  official  life  at  Rome,  but  he  seems  to  have  wel- 
comed the  murder  of  the  Duke  d'^Snghien  as  an  excuse  for 
jesuming  a  haughty  opposition  to  Napoleon,  "  who,"  as  he 
somewhat  fatuously  assures  us,  "  made  the  world  tremble, 
but  me  never."  Yet  these  works  were  not  the  immediate 
result  of  those  years,  but  of  what  he  called  a  Journey  from 


Fiction  under  Bonaparte 


Paris  to  Jerusalem  (1811),  a  trip  undertaken  partly  to 
gather  materials  for  The  Martyrs,  partly  at  the  suggestion 
of  a  lady  who  was  not  quite  ready  to  yield  to  his  seductive 
morgue  and  who  met  him,  on  his  return,  in  the  Alhambra, 
where  for  some  years  their  names  could  be  deciphered 
together.  The  intermingling  of  sensuahty  and  religious 
sentiment  is  as  constant  in  Chateaubriand  as  it  was  in 
Bernardin  and  Rousseau. 

Thus  much  of  the  life  of  Chateaubriand  is  necessary  to 
any  understanding  of  the  ethical  purport  of  his  novels. 
Atala  claims  to  be  a  story  told  at  the  close  of  the  seven- 
teenth century  to  a  melancholy  young  Frenchman,  Ren^, 
in  whom  the  author  intends  that  we  shall  see  himself.  It 
is  narrated  by  the  old  Indian  Chactas,  who  has  been  in 
France  in  the  grand  Steele ^  has  talked  with  F^nelon,  Hstened 
to  Bossuet  and  to  Ninon,  seen  the  tragedies  of  Racine,  and 
acquired  enough  of  civilization  to  combine  an  (Homeric 
simplicity  of  picturesque  imagery  with  the  dainty  refine- 
ments of  the  Hotel  Rambouillet.  |  All  of  which  is  ridiculous 
enough,  but  it  serves  Chateaubriand's  purpose,  which  is  to 
bring  civilization  and  the  "state  of  nature"  into  more 
effective  contrast  than  Rousseau  or  Bernardin  had  done. 
For  Chactas,  knowing  the  best  that  culture  has  to  offer, 
deliberately  prefers  the  wilderness,  as  does  Ren^  himself, 
and,  as  Chateaubriand  gives  us  to  understand,  he  would  do 
also  were  it  not  that  a  weary  condescending  charity  forbids 
him  to  deprive  society  of  his  presence.  Both  Chactas  and 
Ren6  have  had  experiences  somewhat  similar  to  that  of 
Chateaubriand  and  Lucile.  Ren^  loves  his  sister,  Chactas 
a  young  Indian  girl  who  has  sworn  perpetual  virginity.  He 
is  a  captive  among  her  nation.  She  saves  him,  and  to  save 
herself  they  are  forced  to  fly  together.     The  soUtary  jour- 


6  A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

ney  of  the  young  lovers,  for  she  returns  his  affection  though 
guarding  her  vow,  is  described  with  a  lingering  dalliance 
that  some  take  for  sentiniental  purity  and  others  for  lurking 
lubricity.  As  Joubert  said,  the  passions  here  are  "  covered 
with  long  white  veils."  However,  the  pair  come  at  last  to 
the  mission  station  of  Father  Aubry,  the  counterpart  of 
Rousseau's  Savoyard  Vicar  and  Bernardin's  Solitary  Walker. 
There  Atala,  who  "  had  extreme  sensitiveness  joined  to  pro- 
found melancholy,"  presently  died  of  the  disease  that  poets 
call  unrequited  love,  martyr  to  a  romantic  and  therefore 
false  conception  of  duty.  But  while  this  might  detract  now 
from  the  interest  of  the  story,  it  added  greatly  to  its  charm 
in  1800,  in  a  generation  already  predisposed  to  that  maladie 
du  Steele  of  which  Chateaubriand  was  in  part  the  first  tal- 
ented exponent  and  in  part  the  cause. 

This  is  even  more  clearly  the  central  point  of  the  interest 
oi  Rene,  a  second  fragment  detached  from  the  Genius  of 
Christianity  in  1807,  probably  because  its  author  felt  that 
it  would  appeal  to  many  who  did  not  fancy  the  religious 
dilettantism  of  the  latter  work,  and  would  offend  perhaps 
some  that  the  other  attracted.  The  hero  of  this  tale,  as  the 
name  implies,  is  the  person  to  whom  Atala  had  been 
related,  namely  Chateaubriand  himself,  as  he  aspired  to  be 
or  to  be  thought  at  twenty-three.  He  is  a  young  Werther, 
full  of  discouraged  world-pain,  such  as  was  forced  on  many 
men  of  genius,  first  by  the  revolt  against  the  dry  rot  of 
eighteenth-century  philosophy,  then  by  the  lie  direct  given 
to  the  Utopian  dreams  of  the  reformers  by  the  bloody  satur- 
nalia of  the  Revolution.  Where  men  a  decade  before  had 
felt  full  of  hope  and  strength,  they  felt  now,  at  least  those 
of  more  delicate  organization,  for  it  is  they  alone  who  had 
literary  genius  at  this  time,  helpless  and  hopeless.     From 


Fiction  under  Bonaparte 


this  resulted  an  anxious  introspection  and  an  eager  utter- 
ance of  egoism  that  had  begun  with  Rousseau  and  cul- 
minated in  Chateaubriand  and  in  Byron.  Chateaubriand 
and  all  the  victims  of  the  maladie  du  siecle  are  prisoned  in 
themselves.  All  their  invention  consists  of  creating  a  new 
environment  for  their  individuality.  Hence  the  growing 
predominance  in  fiction  of  local  colour.  As  Brunetiere  says, 
"  wherever  the  poet  may  set  up  the  scenery  of  his  work  he 
is  and  remains  its  centre." 

Doubtless  other  agencies  contributed  to  evoke  this  state 
of  mind  in  Chateaubriand  and  in  those  who  read  RenS  with 
eager  enthusiasm.  Among  these  it  is  probably  safe  to 
reckon  the  new  cosmopolitanism  that  had  inoculated  the 
literature  of  France  with  a  virus  from  the  North  contrary  to 
its  nature  and  so  for  the  moment  toxic.  The  interest  in 
foreign  literatures,  the  knowledge  of  English  and  German 
masterpieces  through  translations,  which  grew  more  frequent 
in  this  generation,  troubled  as  it  were  the  equilibrium  of 
the  French  genius.  Speaking  of  a  period  a  little  later,  and 
of  the  novel  Obermann,  George  Sand  says :  "  Ambitions 
took  on  a  character  of  feverish  intensity,  minds  over- 
wrought by  immense  labours  were  suddenly  tried  by  great 
fatigues  and  piercing  agonies.  All  the  springs  of  personal 
interest,  all  the  forces  of  egoism,  extremely  developed  under 
great  tension,  gave  birth  to  unknown  ills  for  which  psychol- 
ogy had  as  yet  assigned  no  place  in  its  annals."  Of  this 
malady  all  sensitively  organized  natures  seem  to  have  felt 
more  or  less  since  the  days  of  VVerther  and  Saint- Preux. 
Goethe  threw  oif  the  disease  and  attained  an  Olympian 
calm,  Rousseau  became  mentally  deranged,  Bernardin  was 
saved  from  it  by  his  fatuity,  Chateaubriand  wrapped  himself 
in  egoistic  indifference,  and  in  Rene,  or  the  Effect  of  the 


8  A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

Passigns  he  has  given  us  the  most  noted  French  exposition 
of  this  state  of  soul.  It  is  this  that  made  him  the  father  of 
romanticism. 

The  moral  influence  of  Rene  was  almost  wholly  evil  and 
obviously  so,  yet  it  was  so  great  and  the  little  tale  so  sums 
and  characterises  the  morbid  virus  of  romanticism  that  it 
is  well  to  let  Ren^  tell  his  story,  as  far  as  may  be  in  his 
own  words  as  he  sits  by  the  banks  of  the  Mississippi,  re- 
garding the  world  with  indifference  and  his  wife  and  child 
near  by  with  a  weary  ennui  of  which  we  may  read  particu- 
lars in  The  Natchez  quite  worthy  to  rank  with  the  rankest 
"  flowers  of  evil "  of  Baudelaire. 

Ren6  is  a  character  for  whom  it  is  hard  to  feel  respect 
or  patience,  a  man  of  brilliant  genius  who  becomes  the 
spendthrift  of  his  talent  through  a  complete  lack  of  even  a 
rudimentary  sense  of  social  duty  or  self-control.  He  has 
an  utter  lack  of  will,  being  indeed  a  monstrosity  of  egoism, 
very  like  in  this  to  Chateaubriand,  so  self-absorbed  that 
nothing  outside  himself  seems  worth  desire  or  contempla- 
tion. Chateaubriand  has  told  us  that  "  people  wearied  him 
by  dint  of  loving  him,"  and  it  was  with  a  somewhat  simi- 
lar condescension  to  the  solicitations  of  his  friends  that 
Ren^  at  last  consented  to  tell  them  "  not  the  adventures  of 
his  life,  for  he  had  experienced  none,  but  the  secret  senti- 
ments of  his  soul,"  of  which  those  of  his  kind  were  always 
replete  to  nausea.  He  describes  himself  at  the  outset, 
very  justly,  as  "  a  young  man  without  force  or  virtue,  who 
finds  in  himself  his  own  torment,  and  has  hardly  any  evils 
to  bemoan  save  those  that  he  had  himself  caused."  We 
know  that  Chateaubriand  was  uncongenial  to  his  parents. 
Ren6  too  has  no  sympathies  in  childhood,  but  it  is  because 
he   has  cost  his  mother  her  life  and  his  father  has  died 


Fiction  under  Bonaparte 


while  he  was  still  young.  As  Chateaubriand  owed  what  he 
was  pleased  to  imagine  his  conversion  to  the  emotions 
attending  the  death  of  his  mother  and  sister,  so  Ren6 
receives  from  his  father's  death  his  first  presentiment  of 
immortality.  The  effect  of  religion,  so  called,  on  character 
was  about  equally  absent  in  both  cases.  Chateaubriand 
could  not  describe  that  of  which  he  knew  nothing.  His 
character  never  attained  an  adult  development.  It  was 
neither  Christian  nor  pagan,  but  hermaphrodite.  And  so 
was  Rent's.  In  youth  this  young  hopeful, "  used  to  go 
apart  to  contemplate  the  fugitive  clouds  or  to  hear  the  rain 
fall  on  the  foliage."  Naturally,  therefore,  when  he  stood 
before  "  the  entrance  to  the  deceptive  paths  of  life  "  he 
cared  to  enter  on  none  of  them.  The  monastic  life,  being 
the  most  obviously  unnatural  and  apparently  useless,  at- 
tracted him  most,  but "  whether  through  natural  inconstancy 
or  prejudice"  he  changed  his  plans  and  resolved  to  nurse 
his  melancholy  on  the  relics  of  antiquity  till  "  he  grew 
weary  of  searching  in  these  grave-clothes  where  too  often 
he  stirred  only  a  criminal  dust." 

At  Paris  Ren^  found  he  was  only  "  belittling  his  life  to 
bring  it  to  a  level  with  society,"  in  the  country  he  was 
"  fatigued  by  the  repetition  of  the  same  scenes  and  ideas." 
No  wonder  that  after  amusing  himself  by  throwing  leaves 
into  a  brook  he  reflects  :  "  See  to  what  a  degree  of  puerility 
our  proud  reason  can  descend."  Ren6  had  reached  this 
point  in  his  mental  and  moral  degeneration  when  he  began 
to  feel  the  desire  of  sharing  it  with  another.  His  feelings, 
here  too,  are  a  curious  perversion  of  mingled  Christianity 
and  paganism.  "  Oh,  God,"  Ren6  exclaims,  "  if  thou 
hadst  given  me  a  wife  after  my  desire,  if  as  to  our  first 
parent  so  to  me  thou  hadst  brought  an  Eve  drawn  from 


lo        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

myself !  Heavenly  beauty,  I  should  have  prostrated  myself 
before  thee,  then  taking  thee  in  my  arms,  I  should  have 
prayed  the  eternal  to  give  thee  the  rest  of  my  life." 

This  is  Chateaubriand's  ideal  of  romantic  love.  As 
Sainte-Beuve  says  ("  Causeries,"  ii.  151),  *'what  he  sought 
in  love  was  less  the  affection  of  any  particular  woman  than 
an  occasion  of  agitation  and  fantasy ;  it  was  less  the  per- 
son that  he  sought  than  the  regret,  the  recollection,  an 
eternal  dream,  the  cult  of  his  own  youth,  the  adoration  of 
which  he  felt  himself  the  object,  the  renewal  or  the  illusion 
of  a  cherished  situation."  This  appears  in  the  relation  of 
Chactas  to  Atala,  it  reappears  in  the  Vell^da  episode  of  The 
MartyrSy  and  especially  in  the  astonishing  later  relation 
that  unites  Ren6  to  C^luta.  To  this  we  shall  recur  pres- 
ently. For  the  moment  Ren6  finds  in  the  kisses  of  his 
sister,  Am^lie,  the  Lucile  of  fact,  the  nearest  approach  to 
contentment  of  which  his  distorted  heart  was  capable. 
*'  In  this  delirious  state,"  he  says,  "  I  almost  came  to  desire 
to  feel  some  evil,  that  I  might  have  at  least  a  real  object  of 
pain."  His  sister  shares  his  feelings,  but,  with  more  per- 
spicacity and  decision  than  Chateaubriand  would  have 
thought  sympathetic  in  his  blas^  hero,  she  takes  refuge  in  a 
convent.  She  writes  to  him,  painting  to  him  the  charms  of 
matrimony  with  a  quivering  pen  that  almost  betrays  itself  at 
the  close.  But  her  separation  from  her  brother  is  only  for 
a  time,  the  same  cradle  held  them  in  childhood  and  the 
same  tomb  shall  soon  unite  their  warm  dust.  "  If  I  snatch 
myself  from  you  in  time  it  is  only  that  I  may  be  joined  to 
you  in  eternity."  Meantime  she  makes  the  sensible  prop- 
osition that  he  should  adopt  some  profession,  a  suggestion 
that  he  must  have  received  with  a  languid  smile.  He  visits 
the  convent  as  Amdlie  is  making  her  monastic  profession, 


Fiction  under  Bonaparte  ii 

and  hears  her  ejaculate  beneath  her  shroud :  "  God  of 
mercy,  grant  that  1  may  never  rise  from  the  funeral  couch, 
and  crown  with  thy  blessings  a  brother  who  has  not  shared 
my  criminal  passion." 

Ren4  now  resolves  to  abandon  civilisation,  but  while 
waiting  for  his  ship  he  "  wanders  constantly  around  the 
monastery,"  reflecting  that  "  here  religion  lulls  the  sensi- 
tive soul  in  sweet  deception.  For  the  fiercest  loves  she 
substitutes  a  sort  of  chaste  glow  in  which  the  virgin  and  the 
lover  are  fused  in  one."  But  Am^lie  finally  died,  very 
much  as  Atala  had  done,  and  Ren^  seems  to  have  thought 
it  proper  to  spend  the  rest  of  his  life  in  diffusing  a  general 
atmosphere  of  unhappiness  around  him.  Of  this  we  learn 
chiefly  from  The  Natchez. 

The  Natchez,  it  may  be  explained,  are  a  tribe  of  Indians, 
now  extinct,  into  which  Rene  has  been  adopted.  This  has 
compelled  him  to  take  a  wife,  C^luta,  from  among  them, 
but  nothing  could  compel  him  to  act  like  a  Christian  or 
even  like  a  gentleman  to  her  or  to  their  child.  Such  a 
conversion  as  Chateaubriand  describes  his  own  to  have 
been  implies  far  less  depth  of  heart  than  shallowness  of 
mind.  "  I  became  a  Christian,"  he  says  in  his  preface  to 
the  Genius  ;  "  I  did  not  yield,  I  confess,  to  any  great  super- 
natural illumination ;  my  conviction  came  from  my  heart ; 
I  wept  and  I  believed."  So  it  was  with  Rene,  and,  as 
Sainte-Beuve  says,  his  letter  to  the  wife  he  has  abandoned, 
dated  "  from  the  Desert  on  the  thirty-second  snow  of  my 
existence,"  is  on  this  subject  the  confession  of  the  author's 
own  heart.  He  tells  this  mother  of  his  daughter  that  he 
does  not  love  her,  that  he  has  never  loved  her,  that  she 
does  not  and  cannot  understand  a  heart  "whence  issue 
flames  that  lack  aliment,  that  would  devour  creation  and 


12        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

yet  be  unsatisfied,  that  would  devour  thee  thyself."  When 
he  is  gone,  he  tells  her,  she  may  marry,  but  he  adds  in 
the  next  paragraph  that  he  knows  she  will  not,  "  for  who 
could  environ  you  with  that  flame  that  I  bear  with  me  even 
though  I  do  not  love."  Of  course  this  is  the  height  of 
fatuousness,  but  more  than  one  woman  seems  to  have  loved 
Chateaubriand's  disdain,  though  he  certainly  would  not 
have  classed  liis  own  spouse  with  the  gentle  C^luta. 

As  for  Ren6  he  assures  his  long-suifering  wife  that  the 
trials  of  his  life,  which  seem  to  us  to  be  mere  figments 
of  a  morbid  fancy,  are  such  that  "  they  might  win  a  man 
from  the  mania  of  life."  He  would  like,  he  says,  **  to  em- 
brace and  stab  you  at  the  same  instant,  to  fix  the  happiness 
in  your  bosom  and  to  punish  myself  for  having  given  it 
to  you,"  precisely  as  Atala  had  desired  "that  divinity 
might  be  annihilated,  if  only  pressed  in  thy  arms  I  might 
have  rolled  from  abyss  to  abyss  with  the  debris  of  God  and 
of  the  world."  Again  in  another  place  Ren^  exclaims  "  Let 
us  mingle  sensuous  joys  with  death,  and  let  the  vault  of 
heaven  hide  us  as  it  falls."  Sainte-Beuve  says  that  in  writ- 
ing thus  Chateaubriand  gave  passion  "a  new  accent,  a 
new  note,  fatal,  wild,  cruel,  but  singularly  poetic.  With 
him  there  always  enters  into  it  a  wish,  an  ardent  desire 
for  the  destruction  and  ruin  of  the  world."  But  this  is 
merely  to  reproduce  a  phase  of  medieval  satanism,  and  if 
Satanism  is  poetic  our  sanity  can  only  protest  that  that  is 
so  much  the  worse  for  poetry. 

Ren^  finds  the  world  so  out  of  joint  that  "  he  is  virtuous 
without  pleasure  and  would  be  criminal  without  remorse." 
He  wishes  he  "  had  never  been  born  or  might  be  for  ever 
forgotten,"  even  by  his  daughter.  "  Let  Ren^  be  for  her," 
he  writes  to  C^luta,  "  an  unknown  man  whose  strange  des- 


Fiction  under  Bonaparte  13 

tiny  when  told  may  make  her  ponder,  and  know  not  why. 
I  wish  to  be  in  her  eyes  only  what  I  am,  a  sad  dream." 
Which  after  all  is  merely  another  way  of  saying  what  we 
knew  before,  that  Chateaubriand  preferred  to  charm  the 
imagination  than  to  win  the  heart,  making  even  of  filial 
sentiment  a  subject  of  self-glorification  and  vanity.  That 
Chateaubriand's  absent  hero  presently  perished  in  a  massa- 
cre of  the  Natchez  was  surely  no  loss  to  the  world,  though 
C^luta  seems  to  have  caught  the  contagion  of  his  folly  and 
drowned  herself  at  the  news  of  her  release. 

The  daughter  that  Ren^  abandoned  was  by  no  means 
the  only  progeny  of  that  melancholy  hero.  Years  afterward, 
Chateaubriand,  still  posing  as  an  enntiye^  wrote  :  "  If  Refie 
did  not  exist,  I  would  not  write  it,  and  if  it  were  possible  to 
destroy  it  I  would  destroy  it.  A  family  of  Ren^s  in  poetry 
and  prose  has  swarmed.  We  have  heard  nothing  but  tear- 
ful, disjointed  phrases.''  "  Evidently,"  comments  Sainte- 
Beuve,  with  a  healthy  scorn,  *'  Ren6  did  not  wish  to  have 
any  children,"  and  to  judge  by  the  way  in  which  Chateau- 
briand treats  Rousseau  and  Bernardin,  he  "  would  have 
preferred  in  literature  to  have  no  father." 

Rene  and  The  Natchez  are,  then,  as  melancholy  a  travesty 
of  Christian  feeling  as  Atala.  They  are  wholly  morbid  and 
essentially  immoral,  but  also  essentially  autobiographic  in 
their  psychology.  Their  charm  and  their  popularity  de- 
pended on  their  morbidity,  which  flattered  an  exceptional 
state  of  the  public  mind,  and  on  their  imagination  and  style. 

The  stories  that  resulted  from  his  visit  to  Palestine,  The 
Last  Abencerage^  as  well  as  The  Martyrs^  may  be  more 
briefly  dismissed.  The  former  is  more  plaintively  morbid 
than  the  American  stories,  but  the  situation  is  the  same  as 
in  Atala  and  RenJ^  namely,  the  conflict  of  passion  with  duty, 


14        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

or  superstition,  or  convention.  All  are  elegies  of  self-torture, 
of  which  the  chief  cause  was  lack  of  common-sense.  And 
the  same  may  be  said  for  The  Martyrs^  where  the  two  epi- 
sodes that  give  it  its  character  as  a  novel,  the  unrequited 
love  and  suicide  of  the  druidess  Vell^da  and  the  unfulfilled 
loves  of  the  virgin  Cymodocee  and  Eudore,  are  character- 
ised by  the  same  teasing  sentimental  toying  with  sensuality. 
The  purpose  of  the  narrative,  as  of  Atala^  Rene^  the  Aden- 
cerragesy  and  The  Natchez,  but  on  a  broader  field  than  they, 
is  to  bring  two  modes  of  life  or  of  ethical  conception  into 
juxtaposition  and  contrast.  As  there  it  had  been  the  civil- 
ised and  the  savage  or  the  Christian  and  the  Moorish,  so 
here  it  is  the  epic  of  rising  Christianity  and  sinking  pagan- 
ism that  he  sings  in  rhythmic  prose.  Indeed  The  Martyrs 
is  The  Genius  of  Christianity  in  action.  The  time  is  that 
of  Diocletian.  The  real  subject  is  the  contrast  between 
Christian  and  pagan  morality,  and,  what  is  more  interesting 
to  Chateaubriand,  between  the  ways  in  which  this  morality 
manifests  itself  in  ceremonial  and  sacrificial  worship.  For 
it  is  much  less  important  to  him  that  the  faith  he  advocates 
should  be  true  to  salvation  than  that  it  should  furnish  occa- 
sion for  esthetic  pleasure  and  pathetic  emotions,  that  it 
should  afford  him  what  he  describes  in  Atala  as  "  the  secret 
and  ineffable  pleasures  of  a  soul  enjoying  itself."  The  va- 
rious scenes  and  descriptions  are  bound  together  by  the 
tale  of  the  chaste  loves  of  Eudore,  the  Christian,  and  Cymo- 
docee, the  descendant  of  Homer,  a  priestess  and  late  con- 
vert. There  is  also  a  druidess  of  less  uneasy  virtue  than 
Cymodocee,  Vell^da,  whom  passion  leads  to  suicide,  for 
Chateaubriand  seems  to  think  no  hero  or  heroine  of  interest 
who  does  not  somehow  make  shipwreck  of  his  life  or  fortune 
in  some  sort  of  crusade  against  common-sense. 


Fiction  under  Bonaparte  15 

The  nearest  antetype  of  llie  Martyrs  is  F^nelon's  Tele- 
machus  (1699).  Like  that  work  it  is  made  the  vehicle  of 
much  chronology  and  geography.  We  are  carried  from 
the  Netherlands  to  Greece,  from  Rome  to  Egypt,  we  are 
introduced  to  nearly  all  the  prominent  characters  of  the 
Ante-Nicene  church  and,  by  a  daring  anticipation,  to  some 
of  the  philosophers  of  the  eighteenth  century  also.  But  the 
great  fault  of  the  book  is  its  rhythmic  style,  that  hovers  be- 
tween prose  and  poetry  in  a  way  most  exasperating  to  the 
modern  reader.  Chateaubriand  may  have  meant  to  show 
us  "  the  language  of  Genesis  beside  that  of  the  Odyssey." 
As  a  matter  of  fact  his  invocations  to  the  Muse,  his  scenes 
in  heaven  and  hell,  and  his  spice  of  the  marvellous,  sup- 
posed to  be  necessary  to  the  making  of  an  epic  ragout, 
seem  singularly  flat  to  modern  taste,  while  on  the  other 
hand  it  must  be  admitted  that  certain  passages,  especially 
the  Patriotic  Cantos  (Chants  de  la  patrie) ,  give  us  perhaps 
the  high-water  mark  of  Chateaubriand's  prose  style. 

It  is  this  art  of  language  that  is  Chateaubriand's  chief 
title  to  literary  remembrance.  His  thought  was  very 
largely  morbid.  It  is  hardly  worth  while  to  inquire  how 
far  he  was  sincere  or  capable  of  sincerity.  In  society  and  in 
ethics  he  was  2l  poseur,  whose  fatuous  conceit  is  endurable 
now  only  to  those  who  have  ceased  to  take  him  seriously. 
But  he  was  an  incomparable  artist  in  words.  And  if  he  fell 
sometimes  on  the  side  to  which  he  inclined  and  erred  by 
excess  of  ornament,  his  genius  was  guided,  guarded,  saved 
from  itself,  by  critical  friends,  whose  taste  he  trusted  and 
whose  discreet  counsels  he  accepted,  much  to  the  gain  of 
his  artistic  reputation.  His  remarkable  gifts  of  vivid  de- 
scription and  eloquent  appeal,  thus  restrained  from  too  ob- 
vious excess,  produced  a  style  of  which  the  effect  can  be  felt 


1 6        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

throughout  the  century.  Thierry  tells  us  how  passages  from 
the  Patriotic  Cantos  in  The  Martyrs  inspired  him  to  write 
his  Merovingian  Tales  (R^cits  des  temps  m^rovingiens, 
1840),  and  even  declares  that  all  the  typical  thinkers  of  the 
first  third  of  the  century  "  had  had  Chateaubriand  at  the 
source  of  their  studies,  at  their  first  inspirations."  Nisard, 
too,  thought  that  "  the  initial  inspiration  as  well  as  the  final 
impulse  of  all  the  durable  innovations  of  the  first  half  of  the 
century  in  poetry,  history,  and  criticism  "  were  due  to  him ; 
to  Villemain  he  was  "  a  renovator  of  the  imagination,"  and 
to  the  cautious  Sainte-Beuve  "  the  first,  the  most  original, 
and  the  greatest  imaginative  writer  "  of  his  day.  The  fruits 
of  this  stylistic  emancipation  of  individualism  may  be  seen 
even  in  our  time.  Chateaubriand  is  the  essential  prelude 
not  only  to  Thierry,  but  to  Lamartine  and  Vigny,  to  the 
young  Hugo,  to  George  Sand,  to  Michelet,  to  Flaubert,  to 
Loti,  and  to  many  others.  It  was  the  example  of  his  dar- 
ing that  taught  men  to  break  boldly,  perhaps  too  boldly 
sometimes,  with  literary  tradition.  For  he  is  the  source, 
not  of  beauties  alone,  but  of  those  exaggerations  of  language 
in  pursuit  of  emotional  effect  that  mar  the  writing  even  of 
such  romantic  masters  as  Hugo.  There  was  an  affectation 
of  simplicity  in  Chateaubriand  that  was  the  very  antithesis 
of  classic  restraint,  though  this  last  had  itself  become  a 
mannerism  during  the  eighteenth  century.  By  his  anxious 
striving  for  originality,  his  studious  discarding  of  classic  my- 
thology and  modes  of  thought,  he  invited  a  reaction  from 
the  sixteenth  century  as  well  as  the  seventeenth,  from  Ron- 
sard  as  well  as  from  Racine,  and  so  became  the  herald  of 
the  romantic  generation. 

It  has  been  said  that  if  the  style  of  Paul  and  Virginia 
resembles  a  statue  of  white  marble,  that  of  Chateaubriand 


Fiction  under  Bonaparte  17 

is  a  statue  of  bronze  cast  by  Lysippus.  The  former  is  more 
polished,  the  latter  more  brilliantly  coloured.  Saint- Pierre 
would  choose  a  well-lighted  landscape.  Chateaubriand 
takes  for  his  matter,  sky,  earth,  and  hell.  The  style  of  the 
one  has  a  fresher  and  younger  air.  That  of  the  other  is 
more  ancient,  as  though  it  were  the  style  of  all  time. 
Saint-Pierre  seems  to  choose  what  is  purest  and  richest  in 
the  language;  Chateaubriand  takes  from  all,  even  from 
vicious  literatures,  but  he  makes  them  undergo  a  veritable 
transformation.  Like  that  famous  metal  which  at  the  burn- 
ing of  Corinth  was  formed  from  the  fusion  of  all  others,  so 
the  language  of  Chateaubriand  fuses  all  his  thoughts  in 
poetic  fire. 

It  may  be  admitted  that  the  Hmitations  of  his  genius 
were  almost  as  striking  as  that  genius  itself.  His  imagina- 
tion gave  a  wonderful  utterance  to  the  feelings  of  his  own 
and  the  following  generation.  It  did  little  or  nothing  to 
direct  or  develop  their  thought.  But  yet  his  novels  are  a 
cardinal  point  in  the  evolution  of  the  French  literary  spirit 
and  of  French  fiction.  They  mark  perhaps  the  most  im- 
portant date  since  the  renascence.  For,  as  Madame  de 
Stael  prepared  the  way  for  the  romantic  school  in  the  realm 
of  thought,  philosophy,  and  criticism,  so  Chateaubriand 
became  its  master  in  the  realm  of  art  and  of  creative 
imagination. 

The  only  influence  comparable  to  his  during  the  first 
and  second  decades  of  the  century  was  that  of  Madame  de 
Stael ;  and  though  this  influence  was  exercised  on  her  suc- 
cessors and  a  few  of  her  female  contemporaries  more  by 
her  criticism  than  by  her  novels,  yet  Delphine  (1802)  and 
Corinne  (1807)  mark  dates  not  to  be  neglected  in  the  story 
of  the  development  of  fiction. 


1 8        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

Madame  de  Stael  was  the  daughter  of  the  Genevese 
banker  and  French  finance  minister  Necker.  She  was 
brought  up  in  the  midst  of  a  brilliant  literary  society  that 
included  the  best  of  the  philosophers  of  the  pre-revolu- 
tionary  generation.  Thus  as  a  child  she  was  breathed  upon 
by  the  spirit  of  liberty  from  America,  with  its  indomitable 
hopefulness  and'  restless  daring,  while  at  the  same  time  she 
was  acquiring  the  well-bred,  sentimentally  virtuous,  flowery 
and  smiling  style  of  her  elders,  with  their  benevolent 
optimism,  their  amiable  cheerfulness,  and  their  brilliant 
iconoclasm.  There  is  probably  no  writer  of  the  Consulate 
and  the  Empire  in  whom  these  characteristics  persist  as 
they  do  in  Madame  de  Stael.  She  is  an  optimist  in  spite 
of  everything.  The  Revolution  and  its  horrors,  even  her 
own  exile,  do  not  shake  her  militant  faith  in  the  constant 
progress  and  final  perfectability  of  human  society,  though 
perhaps  we  should  attribute  this  attitude  as  much  to  her 
vigorous  physique  and  virile  mind  as  to  any  process  of 
ethical  reasoning. 

In  1786  Mademoiselle  Necker  married  the  Swedish 
ambassador  Baron  de  Stael-Holstein,  and  under  the  protec- 
tion of  his  flag  she  remained  in  Paris,  not  without  dabbling 
in  politics,  till  1792.  The  years  of  the  Terror  she  spent  at 
Coppet  near  Geneva,  but  in  1794  she  returned  to  Paris, 
where  both  instinct  and  vanity  led  her  to  oppose  Napoleon, 
and  she  was  banished  from  the  capital  in  1803.  Already 
she  had  written  Delphifie  (1802).  Now,  in  Germany  and 
in  Italy,  her  critical  and  esthetic  faculties  received  a  fuller 
and  more  cosmopolitan  inspiration,  that  was  reflected  in 
Corinne  (1807)  and  in  her  famous  essay  on  Germany. 
She  did  not  return  to  France  till  the  fall  of  Napoleon.  She 
was  already  an  invalid,  and  died  in  18 17. 


Fiction  under  Bonaparte  19 

On  her  youthful  sentimental  essays  in  fiction  there  is  no 
reason  to  dwell,  nor  on  her  private  life  and  more  or  less 
intimate  relations  with  the  literary  men  of  her  time.  What 
has  been  said  will  suffice  to  suggest  what  training  and  what 
experience  she  brought  to  the  writing  of  her  novels,  and 
how  the  chances  of  her  life  aided  her  genius  to  sow  the 
century,  as  has  been  said,  with  fertile  literary  ideas.  For 
Corinne  and  Delphine  are  the  links  that  bind  Rousseau's 
New  Heldise  (1761)  to  Indiana  (1832)  and  the  long 
series  of  the  novels  of  George  Sand.  From  her  youth 
Rousseau  had  been  an  admired  model  and  one  of  the  first 
objects  of  her  independent  criticism.  But  while  the  New 
Heldise  fascinated  her  she  confesses,  that  she  drank  eagerly 
of  the  sentimental  outpourings  of  Madame  Riccaboni,  and 
enjoyed  the  delicate  analyses  of  Madame  de  Tencin  and 
Madame  de  Lafayette.  She  read  Miss  Burney,  too, 
and  dipped  into  Fielding,  but  after  Rousseau  what  seems 
to  have  interested  and  inspired  her  most  was  Richard- 
son's Clarissa  Harlowe.  It  will  be  observed  that  all  these 
writers  have  more  or  less  of  that  moral  sentimentality  that 
characterised  the  reign  of  Louis  XVL ;  and  in  an  essay  on 
fiction  written  in  1795,  as  well  as  in  the  preface  to  Del- 
phine, she  states  frankly,  what  Rousseau  had  implied,  that 
to  her  the  novel  was  "  a  sort  of  veiled  confession  made  to 
those  who  have  lived,  as  well  as  to  those  who  have  life 
before  them."  To  her  the  end  of  the  novel  was  to  reveal 
us  to  ourselves  by  holding  the  mirror  up  to  our  moral 
nature.  Her  novels  are  analytical  observations  of  good 
society  by  a  member  of  good  society ;  and,  since  it  is  easier 
and  safer  to  observe  one's  self  than  others,  Delphine  and 
Corinne  are  drawn  in  large  measure  from  the  author's  inner 
hfe.      Thus   Madame   de   Stael   was   the  first  to  give   in 


20        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

fiction  a  fairly  complete  psychic  portrait  of  a  woman.  But 
to  this  psychologic  interest  she  added  a  moral  purpose. 
Dreading  lest  individuality  should  degenerate  to  egoism, 
she  imposed  herself  on  those  of  her  own  social  station  as 
pedagogue  and  counsellor  in  her  fiction,  just  as  she  was  wont 
to  do  in  her  conversation.  Like  Chateaubriand  she  was  an 
aristocrat,  and  her  novels  are  distinctly  aristocratic.  These 
are  stories  of  serious  moral  purpose,  and  in  signing  them 
with  her  distinguished  name  she  contributed  very  essentially 
to  win  for  fiction  the  place  beside  the  drama  in  France, 
and  above  it  elsewhere  in  Europe,  that  it  has  maintained 
during  the  entire  century.  By  placing  the  interest,  not  in 
intrigue,  but  in  a  picture  of  soul-life  that  is  its  own  inter- 
pretation, she  gave  to  the  novel  a  new  source  of  power  and 
a  higher  place  than  Rousseau  could  claim.  That  she  took 
up  and  carried  on  this  part  of  Madame  de  Stael's  work  is 
the  peculiar  honour  of  George  Sand. 

In  Delphine  we  are  shown  what  Madame  de  Stael  her- 
self possessed,  a  highly  accomplished  mind  and  an  undis- 
ciplined heart,  "civilised  in  her  accomplishments,  almost 
savage  in  her  qualities,"  type  doubtless  of  many  in  this 
strange  generation.  But  Delphine,  choosing  to  guide  her- 
self by  theory  rather  than  by  social  experience,  finds  her 
private  life  involved  in  troubles  corresponding  to  those  in 
which  like  political  ideas  had  involved  the  French  State. 
The  moral  of  it  all  is  that,  for  a  woman  in  society,  upright- 
ness and  good  intentions  are  not  enough.  "  A  man  should 
know  how  to  brave  public  opinion,  a  woman  how  to 
submit  to  it,"  she  says.  Delphine  tries  to  follow  an  inner 
light  without  regard  to  the  prejudices  or  the  conventions  of 
society,  and  society  finds  itself  forced  to  condemn  her  in 
its  own  defence. 


Fiction  under  Bonaparte  21 

Obviously  enough,  this  novel  is  the  literary  precipitate  of 
Madame  de  Stael's  relations  with  Benjamin  Constant,  who 
has  given  us  his  ideas  on  the  same  subject  in  Adolphe 
(18 1 6).  At  intervals  ever  since  1794  she  had  loved,  or 
thought  that  she  loved,  that  talented  man.  Her  husband 
had  died  in  1802,  the  year  of  Delphine,  and  at  this  very 
time  we  find  her  asking  the  rather  striking  question  if 
talent  in  a  woman  "  has  any  other  purpose  than  to  make 
one  a  little  more  beloved."  But  though  her  marriage  with 
Constant  was  a  subject  of  common  talk,  neither  wished  to 
feel  bound,  and  they  parted  at  last  in  mutual  vexation, 
"he  at  not  having  been  instantly  accepted,  she  at  not 
having  been  forced  to  consent."  Then  in  Delphine  she 
freed  her  mind.  It  was  a  confession,  but,  like  George  Sand's 
She  and  He  (1859),  it  was  also  an  apology,  and  so,  natu- 
rally, the  man  of  Delphine's  choice  is  not  given  a  sympa- 
thetic part.  It  was  said  that  in  externals  he  resembled 
Guibert,  an  old  admirer  of  Mile.  Necker,  but  in  character 
he  had  much  of  Constant's  egoistical  timidity,  and  in  sacri- 
ficing his  love  at  last  to  public  opinion  he  did  what  she 
wished  men  to  think  Constant  had  done.  She  let  him  be 
arrested  and  shot  for  incivism,  and  in  the  first  edition  she 
made  Delphine  cut  the  knot  of  existence  by  suicide ;  in  the 
second,  however,  she  borrowed  a  sentimental  touch  from 
Chateaubriand  and  let  her  pine  away,  languishing  of  un- 
requited love,  a  concession  to  a  popular  taste  vitiated  by 
Atala. 

Delphifie  was  distinctly  the  novel  of  Madame  de  Stael's 
youth.  There  is  in  these  letters  a  passion  as  full-blooded 
as  that  of  Mile,  de  Lespinasse.  When  men  criticised,  and 
justly,  the  details  of  her  style  she  could  reply  that  style  is 
the  colour  and  movement  that  language  gives  to  ideas,  and 


22        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

that,  whatever  she  might  lack,  her  pages  had  eloquence, 
imagination,  and  feeling.  And  she  was  right.  Her  incor- 
rectness is  that  of  passionate  speech  and  of  an  overflowing 
heart.  It  seems  palpitating  with  feeling,  spoken  rather 
than  written.  A  contemporary  critic,  Fiev^e,  said  that 
Delphine  "  speaks  of  love  like  a  bacchante,  of  God  like  a 
Quaker,  of  death  like  a  grenadier,  and  of  the  future  like  a 
sophist."  Madame  de  Genlis  and  others  thought  the  book 
morally  dangerous,  but  it  could  be  so  only  to  the  ignorant, 
and  should  have  been  useful  to  the  experienced,  for  it 
helped  to  clear  the  air  of  the  artificial  sentiment  that 
glorified  excess  of  passion  and  emotion,  and,  if  we  may 
trust  some  of  the  novels  of  the  period,  caused  women  to 
"weep  copiously  "  quite  as  often  as  they  ate  a  full  meal. 

In  1803  Madame  de  Stael  was  exiled  from  Paris,  and  a 
change  of  environment  changed  the  nature  of  her  inspira- 
tion. She  now  began  the  study  of  German  literature, 
visited  the  literary  lights  of  Weimar  and  Berlin,  and  found 
in  German  metaphysicians  a  good  antidote  for  the  French 
philosophers.  Then  after  a  short  stay  in  Switzerland  she 
went  in  1804  to  Italy,  and  this  roused  in  her  a  love  for  the 
fine  arts,  and  with  it  an  increasing  appreciation  of  nature. 
Thus  intellectually  stimulated  she  returned  to  Switzerland, 
and  there  wrote  Corinne  during  1806,  in  the  midst  of 
feverish  journeyings  that  betrayed  her  longing  for  the 
homage  of  literary  Paris.  The  success  of  Corinne  on  its 
appearance  was  immediate  and  universal.  Indeed  it  is  the 
crowning  point  of  her  hterary  career,  for  it  is  here  that 
she  gives  to  her  ideals  their  most  complete  expression. 
Corinne,  as  Ch^nier  said,  is  still  Delphine,  but  perfected, 
independent,  giving  freer  wing  to  her  faculties,  and  still 
doubly  inspired,  by  her  talent  and  by  love.    This,  too,  is  a 


Fiction  under  Bonaparte  23 

story  of  an  uncomprehended  woman,  another  link  to  bind 
Julie  to  L^lia.  Like  Delphine,  Corinne  presumes  on  the 
superiority  of  her  mind  and  heart  to  seek  emancipation 
from  social  conventions,  and,  like  her,  she  dies  a  victim  to 
her  own  glory,  which  as  Madame  de  Stael  pathetically  says, 
is  only  "  the  bright  shroud  of  happiness." 

This  novel  has  several  curious  points  of  psychic  contact 
with  Madame  de  Charri^re's  Caliste  (1794).  The  heroine, 
who  unites  Italian  to  English  blood,  has  gone  to  Rome 
to  seek  a  freer  artistic  life  than  English  society  admits. 
But  it  is  in  vain  that  she  abandons  her  dignity  to  her 
love.  She  dies  a  victim  to  social  conventionality.  Thus 
the  general  scheme  of  Corinne  is  almost  identical  with 
that  of  Delphine^  but  here  the  details  are  better  elabo- 
rated and  the  art  is  admirable  with  which  Italy  is  set  off 
against  England,  ideal  love  against  smug  calculation,  na- 
ture against  respectability,  passion  against  cant,  the  glory 
of  the  ideal  against  material  wealth  and  comfort,  the  Col- 
osseum and  the  Capitol  against  the  Bank  and  the  Four- 
o'clock  tea.  To  Corinne  all  thoughts,  passions,  delights 
are  but  ministers  of  love.  Glory,  to  her,  is  but  a  means  to 
love,  and  if  love  fail  glory  has  no  charm.  There  is  a  deep 
pathos  in  this  conception  of  woman's  genius  as  the  victim 
of  passion,  in  whom  every  talent  is  a  new  occasion  of  suffer- 
ing. And  whatever  exaggeration  there  may  be  in  such  a 
conception,  it  is  surely  less  morbid  than  the  posing  pessi- 
mism of  Rend,  and  a  healthier  factor  in  the  formation  of  the 
romantic  school. 

As  her  own  relations  to  Constant  were  the  prototype  of 
those  of  Corinne  to  Oswald,  so  the  minor  characters  also  were 
taken  from  life,  but  it  is  clear  that  her  interest  centres  with 
ours  in  the  heroine  alone.     For,  though  she  admits  at  times 


24        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

historical  or  moral  digressions,  even  the  scenery  is  treated 
by  her,  not,  as  by  Bernardin  or  Chateaubriand,  as  an  object 
of  description  for  description's  sake,  but  solely  for  its  reflec- 
tion of,  or  concord  with,  the  state  of  soul  of  her  characters. 
Very  curious  is  the  contrast  between  her  treatment  of  Rome 
and  that  of  Chateaubriand  in  the  nearly  contemporary  Mar- 
tyrs, She  is  always  the  emotional  thinker,  he  the  conscious 
artist.  But  her  melancholy,  which  she  shares  with  Chateau- 
briand, is  only  a  part  of  her  optimistic  idealism.  Happiness 
is  always  hovering  before  her  and  beckoning  her  on,  and  it 
is  this  that  made  Corinne  for  a  whole  romantic  generation 
the  book  of  generous  passion  and  of  ideal  love. 

But  it  was  not  by  Corinne  alone  that  Madame  de  Stael 
acted  on  the  fiction  of  the  immediate  predecessors  of 
romanticism  and  on  the  masters  of  that  school.  By  her 
essays  on  literature  and  on  Germany  she  gathered  up  what 
was  most  fruitful  in  the  eighteenth  century  and  passed  it  on 
vivified  by  new  esthetic  ideals  and  by  a  new  cosmopolitan 
spirit.  All  the  Latin  literatures,  French,  Italian,  Spanish, 
had  been  till  then  essentially  objective,  rationalistic,  artistic, 
and  often  materialistic.  She  more  than  any  one  else  intro- 
duced into  French  fiction  the  English  and  German  idealism 
and  individualism.  The  reawakening  of  the  ego^  heralded 
by  Rousseau  and  Bernardin,  is  accomplished  in  the  next 
generation.  That  reawakening,  that  regeneration  through 
the  romantic  school  is  in  large  measure  the  glory  of  Madame 
de  Stael. 

One  of  the  first  signs  of  this  reawakening  is  the  increased 
number  of  women  that  seek  a  literary  expression  for  their 
feelings.  Besides  those  who  belong  rather  to  the  closing 
years  of  the  preceding  century,  in  spirit  if  not  in  time,  such 
as  Madame  de  Genlis,  Madame  de  Charri^re,  and  Madame 


Fiction  under  Bonaparte  25 

de  Souza,  there  was  Madame  de  Kriidener  (i  764-1824),  a 
German  from  the  Baltic,  who  wandered  over  the  face  of 
Europe  and  finally  died  in  the  Crimea,  but  who  belongs  to 
French  literature  both  by  her  writings  and  her  associations. 
For  a  brief  time  after  Waterloo  she  played  a  part  in  French 
politics  to  which,  as  to  her  mysticism,  it  is  possible  only  to 
allude  here.  Our  interest  in  her  is  for  her  Valerie^  which 
to  the  readers  of  1803  seemed  a  French  Werther,  the 
worthy  rival  oi  Rene  and  oiVelphine,  and  even  to-day  is  not 
without  its  charm.  Valerie  is  the  first  conscious  effort  to 
blend  the  English,  French,  and  German  spirits  into  a  cos- 
mopolitan one.  The  style  throughout  is  good,  remarkable 
in  a  foreigner,  and  there  are  some  bits  of  description,  such 
as  the  shawl-dance,  that  were  once  regarded  as  masterpieces. 
The  story  as  a  whole,  in  spite  of  some  sentimental  excesses, 
deserves  to  be  read  still,  for  its  own  sake  and  because  it  is 
one  of  the  most  interesting  of  the  early  utterances  of  the 
"  misunderstood  woman." 

Following  closely  in  time  on  the  five  ladies  already 
named  were  Pauline  de  Meulan  (i 773-1827)  and  Madame 
de  Cottin  (17 73-1807).  The  former,  who  later  became 
Madame  Guizot,  won  more  fame  for  her  writings  in  journal- 
ism, ethics,  and  pedagogy  than  for  her  novels,  in  which  a 
sane  wit  covers  a  sober  observation,  that  makes  The  Con- 
tradictions (les  Contradictions,  1 800)  or  Ayto7i  Chapel  (la 
Chapelle  d' Ay  ton,  1801)  pleasant  though  small  oases  in  the 
waste  of  contemporary  sentiment.  But  they  are  not  charac- 
teristic of  their  time  and  met  with  small  success.  The 
vogue  of  Madame  Cottin  was  much  greater,  and  her  Exiles 
of  Siberia  (les  Exil^es  de  Sib^rie,  1806)  won  the  praise  of 
imitation  from  Xavier  de  Maistre  in  his  Young  Siberian 
6^/W  (la  Jeune  sib^rienne,  1825).     Its  vogue  passed,  how- 


26        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

ever,  as  rapidly  as  it  rose,  and  in  the  next  generation  Sainte- 
Beuve  tells  us  that  Madame  Cottin's  books  were  read  only 
"  out  of  curiosity  to  learn  the  emotional  moods  of  our 
mothers." 

In  1802  another  lady  conspicuous  in  Parisian  society, 
Madame  Sophie  Gay,  conceived  the  idea  of  writing  Laure 
d'Estell  to  show  how  much  she  liked  Madame  de  Stael  and 
disliked  Madame  de  Genlis.  The  mock  melancholy  of  this 
book  was  far  more  in  the  spirit  of  the  time  than  in  her  own, 
which  found  its  natural  voice  in  Leonie  de  Montbreuse 
(18 1 3),  an  admirable  study  of  the  straw-fire  of  youthful  pas- 
sion, leading  to  the  thoroughly  French  conclusion  that  the 
sure  way  to  happiness  for  a  girl  is  to  marry  the  choice  of 
her  father.  During  the  Restoration  and  the  Orleanist  mon- 
archy Madame  Gay  wrote  a  vast  number  of  novels  that  re- 
flect so  well  the  taste  of  their  several  dates  as  to  call  for  no 
notice,  and  much  the  same  may  be  said  of  the  novels  of 
her  daughter,  Delphine  Gay  (i 804-1855),  who  became 
Madame  de  Girardin  and  was  a  voluminous  writer  of  soci- 
ety novels,  of  which  the  best  is  doubtless  The  Eyeglass  (le 
Lorgnon,  1831). 

A  more  marked  individuality  is  Madame  de  Duras 
(17  78-1829),  who  belonged  to  the  literary  generation  of 
the  Empire,  though  she  wrote  later  "  with  the  emotions  of 
great  catastrophes  behind  her,"  and  never  quite  recovered 
from  the  terror  that  had  blighted  her  youth.  So  both  her 
Ourika  (1823)  ^^^  ^^^  tdouard  (1825)  deal  with  social 
inequaUties  and  prejudices.  In  the  former  the  heroine  is  a 
gentle  maid  from  Senegal,  of  French  nurture  and  negro 
blood;  in  the  latter  we  have  an  anticipation  of  George 
Sand's  Miller  of  Angibault  (1845)  in  the  love  of  plebeian 
and  noblewoman.    Through  both  novels  there  runs,  how- 


Fiction  under  Bonaparte  27 

ever,  as  would  hardly  have  been  the  case  a  little  later,  a 
deep  spirit  of  Christian  resignation.  Here  priests  are  once 
more  confessors,  austere  spiritual  guides,  and  the  convent  is 
still  a  refuge  for  storm-tossed  lives.  So  while  these  books 
are  marked  by  the  Terror,  they  are  marked  also  by  the 
Genius  of  Christianity  and  by  the  resigned  melancholy  of 
Lamartine's  Meditations.  Thus  her  work,  though  slight, 
has  great  interest  for  the  literary  psychologist,  because,  while 
she  represents  the  best  phase  of  the  culture  of  the  Restora- 
tion, she  represents  also,  as  Sainte-Beuve  has  noted,  by  her 
oscillation  between  passionate  revolt  and  Christian  resigna- 
tion, by  her  style  and  by  her  life,  "  something  of  the  most 
touching  destinies  of  the  seventeenth  century." 

Many  other  women  there  were  who  sought  literary  utter- 
ance at  this  time,  among  whom  it  may  be  well  to  note 
Madame  de  Montolieu  and  Madame  de  Remusat ;  but  the 
fact  that  they  wrote  is  more  significant  than  their  writing. 
Meantime,  among  men,  Senancour  and  Constant  had  taken 
up,  each  in  his  way,  the  melancholy  burden  of  Ren^.  Se- 
nancour is  known  solely  for  his  Obermann  (1804),  a  novel  in 
letters,  that  strikes  the  deepest  note  of  despair  and  reveals 
the  profoundest  pessimism  in  this  disillusioned  age.  "  Ren6 
says  :  *  If  I  could  will  I  could  do.'  Obermann  says  :  *  Why 
should  I  will?  I  cannot.'  "  This  epigram  of  George  Sand 
exhibits  a  new  phase  of  despair.  No  writer  had  pushed 
pessimism  to  such  blank  negation  as  Senancour,  nor  will 
any  writer  of  the  century,  save  only  Vigny,  give  it  more 
eloquent  expression  j  for  these  reveries  of  impotence  are 
conducted  with  admirable  literary  skill,  in  spite  of  an  ap- 
parent lack  of  system  and  co-ordination. 

Obermann  is  cast  in  the  form  of  a  novel,  but  it  is  rather  a 
series  of    melancholy  reflections  on  nature  and  society 


28        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

exactly  suited  to  the  morbid  sentiment  of  the  romantic 
generation,  so  that  after  a  period  of  comparative  neglect 
the  book  became  exceedingly  popular  during  the  days  of 
Charles  X.  and  Louis  Philippe,  and  like  feelings  have  made 
it  again  a  favourite  in  our  day  in  a  narrow  circle  of  minds 
too  delicately  organised  to  brook  our  modern  life.  It 
should  be  noted,  however,  that  it  is  isolated,  that  it  did  not 
translate,  as  did  Rene,  the  spirit  of  its  time,  but  rather  that 
of  1830  and  of  our  own  day. 

Another  novel  stands  in  isolation  at  the  close  of  the 
period  we  are  considering,  the  Adolphe  (18 16)  of  Benjamin 
Constant  (i 767-1830),  which  was  the  literary  precipitate 
of  the  author's  relations  with  Madame  de  Stael,  as  Delphine 
had  been  hers.  It  was  the  sole  novel  of  this  versatile 
politician,  and  is  a  clear,  keen,  relentless,  and  realistic 
analysis  of  the  mutual  degradation  that  results  from  an  ill- 
assorted  union.  The  story  is  brief,  almost  cruelly  simple, 
and  told  in  a  style  as  precise  and  dry  as  that  of  a  mathemat- 
ical demonstration. 

The  feeble  egoism  of  Adolphe  may  seem  contemptibly 
romantic,  but  the  novel  is  a  faithful  piece  of  psychic  auto- 
biography. Externally  the  story  may  be  taken  from  the 
relation  of  Chretien  de  Lamoignon  and  Madame  Lindsay 
and  the  author  has  been  gallant  enough  to  dissociate  Ellenore 
from  Madame  de  Stael.  But  Adolphe  is  Constant,  his 
father  is  Constant's  father,  his  former  lover  is  Madame  de 
Charri^re,  his  officious  lady  friend  is  Madame  R^camier ; 
and  the  best  commentaries  on  this  true  cameo  of  romantic 
psychology  are  his  correspondence,  his  journals,  and  indeed 
all  that  we  know  of  a  life  spent,  as  Sainte-Beuve  says,  in 
seeing  emotion  always  without  ever  attaining  to  passion. 

One  would  not  quite   do  justice  to  this  pre-romantic 


Fiction  under  Bonaparte  29 

generation  if  one  failed  to  note  that,  together  with  the 
vociferous  despair  of  Ren^,  the  voluntary  ataxia  of  Ober- 
mann  and  Adolphe,  and  the  hyperaesthesia  of  Madame  de 
Stael's  sentiment,  a  clear  though  slender  plea  for  com- 
mon-sense was  raised  by  Xavier  de  Maistre  (1763-185  2) 
whose  work  began  with  that  genial  afterglow  of  eighteenth- 
century  wit,  the  Journey  around  my  Room  (Voyage  autour 
de  ma  chambre,  1794),  and  culminated  in  The  Lepers  of  the 
city  of  Aosta  (les  L^preux  de  la  cit6  d'Aoste,  181 1), 
though  The  Young  Siberian  Girl  ( 1 8 1 5  )  and  The  Prisoners 
of  the  Caucasus  (les  Prisonniers  du  Caucasse,  1815)  have 
maintained  for  two  generations  their  eminence  as  models 
of  vigorous  and  direct  narration.  They  combine,  as  does 
all  the  fiction  of  Maistre,  an  observation  and  power  of 
description  almost  as  exact  as  that  of  Merim^e  with  a  senti- 
mental affection  that  suggests  Sterne,  or  perhaps  rather 
Marivaux.  Thus  he  stands  apart,  not  wholly  of  the  eigh- 
teenth nor  of  the  nineteenth  century,  and  wholly  aloof  from 
that  romantic  school  whose  fall  he  lived  to  see  and  whose 
rise  we  shall  presently  consider. 


CHAPTER   II 

THE   NOVELS   OF   STENDHAL 

HENRI  BEYLE,  who  called  himself  and  is  more 
generally  called  "  Stendhal,"  took  pleasure  in  pos- 
ing as  an  isolated  and  peculiar  nature  born  out  of  due 
time,  and  though  doubtless  there  was  much  affectation  in 
his  attitude,  yet  we  too  must  consider  him  so,  though  not, 
indeed,  because  he  languidly  affected  to  detest  his  family, 
his  parents,  his  teachers,  his  native  province,  and  even  his 
fellow-countrymen  en  masse,  and  pretended  to  feel  at  home 
only  in  Italy,  where,  as  he  said,  "  the  human  plant  lives 
more  vigorously  than  elsewhere,  for  it  is  the  sole  country 
of  art,  of  poetry,  and  of  love." 

As  a  critic,  Stendhal  was  perverse  and  contradictory. 
Whatever  Frenchmen  agreed  to  admire  he  assumed  to 
slight,  and  he  chose  their  greatest  aversion  for  his  admira- 
tion. It  was  as  though  in  literature  and  art  he  had  said : 
"  Evil,  be  thou  my  good  ;  and  good,  my  evil."  Moli^re  had 
for  him  no  great  comic  genius,  Chateaubriand  would  be 
soon  forgotten,  Hugo's  sound  and  fury  signified  nothing, 
Vigny's  gloom  was  silly  pessimistic  posing.  On  the  other 
hand,  the  exiled  Emperor  was  his  ideal  liberal  in  govern- 
ment, and  Racine  utterly  unworthy  of  comparison  with 
Shakspere.  Many  of  these  views  have  a  very  considerable 
element  of  truth  in  them.  Some  seem  almost  common- 
place to-day,  but  during  the  Restoration,  at  least  in  its  first 
decade,   they   seemed  perversely   iconoclastic.     And    the 


The  Novels  of  Stendhal 


31 


man  himself  irritated  opposition  rather  than  evoked  sym- 
pathy. Endowed  by  nature  with  a  most  commonplace 
physique,  his  efforts  to  distinguish  himself  in  dress  and 
manner  served  only  to  give  him  the  repute  of  a  ridiculous 
affectation.  Thus  it  happened  that  his  personality  was  lit- 
tle esteemed  and  his  writing  little  admired  in  his  lifetime. 
Balzac  alone  seems  to  have  recognized  in  him  a  kinship 
to  the  analytical  side  of  his  own  manifold  genius.  In  the 
next  generation  Sainte-Beuve  ventured  to  caution  Taine, 
who,  in  his  French  Philosophers  (Philosophes  frangais,  185  7), 
had  pronounced  Stendhal  "  a  great  romancer,  the  greatest 
psychologist  of  the  century."  To  Sainte-Beuve  his  novels 
were  "never  quite  satisfactory,  in  spite  of  pretty  portions, 
and  take  them  all  together,  they  were  detestable."  Gradu- 
ally, however,  as  the  memory  of  the  man  has  receded,  his 
works  have  seemed  to  draw  nearer.  He  had  said  himself 
that  he  "would  be  understood  about  1880,"  and  curiously 
enough  this  date  does  represent  the  period  when  his  repu- 
tation reached  its  culmination  with  the  rising  prominence 
of  the  psychological  school  in  fiction,  who  joined  with  the 
naturalists  in  claiming  him  as  their  legitimate  ancestor. 
Bourget,  for  once,  could  echo  the  sentiment  of  Zola  and 
accept  Stendhal  as  "  the  father  of  us  all." 

To  understand  the  unique  place  of  his  fiction,  it  is  neces- 
sary to  have  in  mind  both  the  chief  facts  of  his  life  and  also 
of  his  social  philosophy.  He  is  the  only  novelist  with 
whom  we  shall  have  to  deal  who  brings  to  his  writing  the 
experience  of  active  participation  in  the  Napoleonic  cam- 
paigns. This  alone  would  tend  to  give  him  a  place  apart, 
but  the  experiences  of  his  youth  had  already  segregated 
him  from  the  common  type  of  his  generation.  He  was 
born  in  1783  and  found  the  influences  of  the  household 


/ 


32        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

in  which  he  passed  his  childhood  so  irritating  that  he  was 
impelled  to  oppose  anything  that  they  seemed  to  approve. 
Did  his  family  seem  devoted  to  church  and  king?  Then 
he  would  be  sceptic  and  jacobin,  would  find  the  reign 
of  Terror  mild,  and  "  feel  the  liveliest  joy  "  at  the  execution 
of  Louis.  The  only  sincere  prayer  of  thanksgiving  that 
he  seems  to  have  uttered  was  when,  on  hearing  of  the 
death  of  his  aunt,  he  threw  himself  on  his  knees  "  to  thank 
God  for  that  great  deliverance."  From  the  clergy  who 
superintended  his  early  education,  and  for  whom  he  enter- 
tained very  similar  feelings,  he  was  delivered  also,  some- 
what later,  when  in  1 799  he  went  to  Paris,  whence  in  the 
next  year  he  was  enabled  to  go  to  join  Bonaparte  in  Italy 
and  to  take  up  the  life  of  action  to  which  he  had  so  long 
aspired.  He  tells  us  that  he  "  was  so  absorbed  in  the 
excess  of  joy  "  at  this  departure  that  he  cannot  recall  and 
analyse  his  feelings,  though  his  character  appears  delight- 
fully in  a  little  scene  thus  recounted  by  his  biographer 
Rod:  — 

"  He  faced  fire  for  the  first  time  under  the  fort  of  Bard, 
,  .  .  but  all  that  he  could  recall  afterward  was  this  remark 
of  a  captain,  whom  he  had  asked,  *  Are  we  within  range  ?  * 
'  Look  at  the  fellow  who 's  afraid  already,'  said  the  old 
veteran.  As  there  were  seven  or  eight  persons  present,  the 
remark  had  its  full  effect.  Beyle  exposed  himself  as  much 
as  he  could,  exhibited  his  courage  without  however  attract- 
ing particular  observation,  and  that  evening  asked  himself 
in  all  sincerity,  *  Is  this  all  ? '  This  disappointed  excla- 
mation was  to  escape  from  him  often  in  the  course  of  his 
existence,  active  and  filled  as  it  was.  There  was  always 
a  disproportion  between  events  and  what  he  expected  of 
them.     To  his  hunger  for  emotion,  war  and  love,  which 


The  Novels  of  Stendhal  33 

he  preferred,  remained  always  beneath  his  desires,  yet 
he  never  ceased  to  seek  and  to  enjoy  them.  During  the 
Russian  campaign  by  the  bivouac  fire  he  used  to  ask  as 
before  the  fort  of  Bard,  *Is  that  all?'  This  phrase  was 
always  the  melancholy  refrain  of  his  Hfe,  the  Leitmotiv  of 
his  experiences." 

That  Italiaii  campaign  was,  he  says,  "  the  best  period 
of  his  life,"  and  one  sees  it  reflected  in  the  enthusiasm  of 
his  posthumous  Life  of  Napoleon  (1876),  and  in  his  best 
novel.  The  Chartreuse  of  Parma  (la  Chartreuse  de  Parme, 
1839).  This  period  of  active  ambition  lasted,  by  his  own 
account,  till  181 1,  and  was  succeeded  from  1811  to  1818 
by  love  for  a  woman  who  deceived  him,  and  then  by  more 
transitory  affections  and  jealousies,  on  which  he  has  left 
curious  comments  of  self-analysis  in  his  Love  (Sur  1  'amour, 
1822),  and  still  more  in  hxs  Journal  (1888).  Ill  health 
had  constrained  him  to  leave  the  army  somewhat  before 
the  battle  of  Leipzig.  He  withdrew  to  Milan,  always  his 
favourite  residence,  and  watched  with  apparent  calm  the 
abdication  and  final  struggle  of  his  old  chief.  Expatriated 
by  choice,  he  remained  in  Italy,  with  brief  visits  to  Paris, 
until  his  death,  isolated  thus  socially,  as  he  was  also 
morally  and  esthetically.  He  was  absolutely  out  of  sym- 
pathy with  his  age  and  with  romanticism.  The  revamped 
medieval  Christianity  of  Chateaubriand  affected  him  much 
as  it  would  have  done  Voltaire.  The  sentimental  self- 
torture  of  Ren6  disgusted  him  much  as  it  does  us  to-day. 
To  him  emotions  were  objects  of  study,  not  occasions  of 
sympathy.  He  made  himself  and  his  friends  the  subject 
of  constant  relentless  analysis,  in  which  he  would  suffer 
no  embellishment  and  no  intrusion  of  the  imagination. 
He  notes  on  hearing  the  death  of  his  father  that  "  during 

3 


^- 


34        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

the  first  month  I  sought  in  vain  to  be  grieved.  The 
reader  will  think  me  a  bad  son,  and  he  will  be  right." 
Elsewhere  he  says  that  his  life  has  been  filled  with  un- 
happy love-affairs,  and  notes  eleven  names  of  ladies  with 
the  reflection,  "I  was  not  gallant,  not  enough."  Again 
he  resolves  to  achieve  the  reputation  of  being  the  greatest 
poet  of  France,  *'  not  by  intrigue  like  Voltaire,  but  by 
deserving  it."  Elsewhere  we  shall  find  him  admiring  "  the 
inimitable  physiognomy  of  my  conversation "  and  "  the 
reflection,  a  la  Moliere,  that  I  made  at  that  moment."  But 
we  shall  be  in  danger  of  colouring  our  judgment  if  we  dwell 
too  long  on  the  facile  fatuousness  of  his  Journal.  The 
best  that  is  in  him,  all  that  concerns  us  here,  is  in  his 
novels,  and  to  these  we  may  turn,  recalling  only  the  wide 
experience  and  habit  of  indefatigable  analysis  that  he 
brought  to  their  composition  at  the  ripest  period  of  his 
mind's  development. 

These  novels  are  ^rw««r<?  (1827),  The  Red  and  the  Black 
(le  Rouge  et  le  noir,  183 1),  The  Chartreuse  of  Farma 
(la  Chartreuse  de  Parme,  1839),  two  novels  unfinished  at 
his  death,  Latniel,  and  The  Green  Chasseur  (le  Chasseur 
vert),  as  well  as  some  rather  insignificant  short  stories. 
In  all  these  works  the  end  proposed  by  the  author  is 
the  same,  to  discover  the  sources  of  happiness  in  human 
life  by  the  analysis  of  the  motives  and  means  of  its  pursuit. 
Thus  he  is  philosophically  the  disciple  of  the  optimistic 
encyclopaedists  of  the  eighteenth  century,  most  of  all 
perhaps  of  Condillac.  This  is  more  clearly  seen  in  the 
later  novels,  but  it  is  obvious  even  in  Armafice,  where 
Stendhal  has  paid  his  passing  tribute  to  the  spirit  of 
the  time  and  of  Ren6.  He  has  placed  his  scene  in  the 
aristocratic  Faubourg  Saint-Germain,  and   he   has  striven 


The  Novels  of  Stendhal  35 

to  paint  this  background  accurately  from  observed  data; 
but  it  is  doubtful  if  he  understood  or  penetrated  beneath 
the  surface  of  the  society  he  attempted  to  describe,  and 
it  is  certain  that  the  characters  whom  he  places  against 
this  background  are  thoroughly  romantic  and  Byronic. 
Octave  is  a  creature  of  fate,  desperate  and  declamatory ; 
Armance  is  a  noble  girl,  too  proud  to  yield  to  her  love 
for  him  or  even  to  confess  it,  though  she  die  of  her  secret. 
Surely  it  needs  little  penetration  to  see  Ren^  and  Am^lie 
here,  as  well  as  a  little  of  Stendhal  himself  in  the  self- 
tormenting  fear  of  each  lover  that  he  or  she  may  be 
the  dupe  of  the  other,  with  the  result  that  both,  but 
especially  Octave,  become  singularly  irritating.  What 
shall  we  think  of  a  young  man  whose  life  is  so  intensely 
unreal  that  he  is  *•  impatient  of  society  because  it  distracts 
and  draws  him  importunately  from  his  dear  reverie,"  and 
who  is  so  frightened  at  discovering  that  he  is  growing  fond  of 
his  fair  cousin  that  he  is  guilty  of  such  utter  fatuousness  as 
the  exclamation  :  "  I  love.  I  !  To  love  !  Great  God  !  .  .  . 
I  had  in  my  favour  only  my  own  esteem^  I  have  lost  it !  " 
Whereupon  he  breaks  out  in  "transports  of  rage  and  cries 
of  inarticulate  fury."  Evidently  Octave  loves  himself  too 
much  to  love  another  with  his  whole  heart.  But  with 
Armance  love  is  checked  by  fear  both  for  herself  and  for 
his  constancy,  so  that  she  becomes  distrustful,  restless, 
inconsequent.  In  both  characters  Stendhal  seems  to  be 
analysing  himself,  though  we  know  that  the  first  suggestion 
of  the  situation  came  to  him  from  Olivier,  an  unpublished 
story  of  the  Duchess  of  Duras,  and  there  is  in  him 
no  masquerade  of  Christian  ethics  as  in  Chateaubriand. 
Given  these  natures,  the  course  of  love  in  the  two  is  traced 
with  remarkable  and  minute  perspicacity  till  Octave  termi- 


I 


36        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

nates  it  by  a  jealous  suicide,  an  end  that  we  may  call 
happy  by  contrast  to  the  broken,  dolorous  life  that  stretches 
before  the  personages  of  Stendhal's  later  novels  as  we  turn 
the  last  page. 

Stendhal's  biographer  Rod  is  probably  right  in  thinking 
that  Stendhal  put  most  of  himself,  as  was  natural,  into  his 
first  novel.  Later  he  became  more  distrustful  of  his  own 
sentiments.  The  work  becomes  harder  and  colder,  the 
analysis  more  pitilessly  minute.  The  result  of  extending 
the  circle  of  his  psychological  observation  becomes  obvious 
three  years  later  in  The  Red  and  the  Black  (1830),  where 
we  bid  a  last  farewell  to  Ren^,  and  are  shown  in  Julien  Sorel 
a  new  and  typical  novelistic  creation,  of  such  strength  that 
one  cannot  but  be  surprised  to  find  that  it  required  ten 
years  and  the  trumpet  call  of  Balzac  to  rouse  France  to  a 
recognition  of  its  merits.  Jill  then,  if  we  may  judge  from 
Stendhal's  correspondence,  the  greater  part  of  its  few  read- 
ers had  sought  only  autobiography  and  sniffed  only  scandal. 
Stendhal  no  doubt  put  into  Julien  somewhat  of  himself,  but, 
in  the  main,  Julien  is  rather  his  aversion.  He  is  incarnate 
democracy,  seeking  to  make  for  itself  a  place  in  society  by 
its  wits.  Stendhal  was  by  nature  an  aristocrat,  and  one  of 
the  first  to  see  the  ultimate  effect  of  general  suffrage.  He 
sees  in  France  a  generation  whose  school-days  were  filled 
with  the  triumphs  and  defeats  of  the  Empire,  whose  eyes 
had  been  dazzled  by  changes  of  fortune  that  till  then  had 
seemed  to  belong  only  to  the  dreams  of  Arabian  Nights, 
They  had,  Stendhal  tells  us,  "  the  example  of  the  drummer 
Duke  of  Bellune,  of  the  petty  officer  Augereau,  of  all  the 
lawyers'  clerks  who  had  become  senators  and  counts  of  the 
Empire,"  and  they  felt  themselves  irritated  beyond  bearing 
by  the  resuscitation  of  the  Old  Regime  attempted  at  the 


The  Novels  of  Stendhal  37 

Restoration.  Of  such  men  Julien  is  an  intensified  type,  as 
Augier's  Giboyer  of  the  proletarian  of  the  second  Empire. 
This  is  the  significance  of  the  rather  enigmatic  title,  —  Red 
for  democratic  liberty,  for  the  opening  of  all  careers  to  all 
ambitions,  and  for  the  reflection  of  the  sun  of  Austerhtz ; 
Black  for  the  monarchical  and  Jesuitical  reaction  of  Charles 
X.  and  the  Vill^le  ministry,  till  an  outraged  nation  drove 
him  from  the  throne  he  darkened  and  the  country  he  was 
stifling. 

The  scene  of  The  Red  and  the  Black  opens  in  Franche- 
Comt^  at  the  house  of  a  royalist  mayor  who  has  a  simple 
but  pretty  wife  and  is  seeking  a  tutor  for  his  two  children, 
being  moved  thereto  by  a  desire  to  show  his  superiority  to 
a  rival  for  social  distinction,  —  a  motive  that  marks  the  age. 
They  have  chosen  for  this  office  Julien  Sorel,  a  carpenter's 
son,  who  has  studied  for  the  priesthood,  that  being  appar- 
ently the  line  of  least  resistance  to  the  "  struggle- for-lifers  " 
of  that  day.  Now,  Juhen  is  devoured  by  passionate  and 
envious  ambition,  he  is  educated  beyond  his  station,  and 
hates  those  who  help  him,  because  he  needs  their  help. 
Vanity  and  pride  rather  than  any  form  of  love  urge  him  to 
seduce  the  wife  and  to  dishonour  the  husband.  "  Here," 
reflects  the  self-satisfied  Julien,  "is  a  woman  of  superior 
mind  reduced  to  the  depth  of  misfortune  because  she  has 
known  me." 

Having  profited  by  this  first  essay  in  hypocrisy,  and  hav- 
ing taken  for  his  moral  guide  in  life  the  maxim  "  never  to 
say  anything  that  did  not  seem  false  to  himself,"  Julien 
returns  to  his  seminary,  where  he  finds  himself  in  the  pres- 
ence of  past  masters  of  the  art  he  is  attempting  to  acquire. 
The  description  of  this  seminary  is  among  the  most  effec- 
tive things  in  the  book,  and  entitles  it  to  rank,  as  some  one 


38        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

has  said,  as  "a  veritable  breviary  of  hypocrisy."  The  next 
portion  of  the  book,  JuHen's  relations  with  Mathilde  de  la 
Mole,  is  less  satisfactory  as  a  whole,  though  the  culmination 
of  their  intrigue  is  perhaps  the  best  single  episode  of  the 
novel.  In  her  Stendhal  endeavoured  to  present  the  female 
counterpart  of  Julien,  but  the  analysis  of  motive  is  pushed 
to  a  wearisome  virtuosity.  Zola  says  that  Stendhal  here 
reminds  him  of  those  billiard-players  who  create  difficulties 
just  to  show  that  there  is  no  position  of  the  balls  in  which 
they  cannot  make  a  carom.  At  every  moment  Julien, 
Mathilde,  and  others  too,  examine  their  consciences  and 
listen  to  their  thinking,  with  the  surprise  and  delight  of  a 
child  who  holds  a  watch  to  his  ear. 

The  climax  of  the  novel  is  decidedly  overwrought. 
Julien  has  brought  matters  to  a  position  where  the  Marquis, 
Mathilde's  father,  is  constrained  to  desire  their  marriage. 
The  proletarian's  social  ambition  is  about  to  be  crowned, 
when  the  mayor's  wife  writes  a  letter  that  breaks  off  the 
match.  With  an  Italian  fury  such  as  always  hovered  before 
Stendhal  as  an  ideal,  Julien  seeks  out  the  traitress,  finds  her 
kneeling  in  church,  and  shoots  her  as  she  prays.  He  is 
arrested,  tried,  guillotined,  but  not  until  he  has  left  us  fifty 
pages  of  reflections  on  the  last  days  of  a  condemned  man, 
a  defence  of  passion  as  the  supreme  arbiter  of  destiny  that 
is  intended  to  make  us  look  on  Julien's  execution  as  his 
apotheosis.  "Leave  me  my  ideal  life,"  he  says  to  those 
who  seek  his  rescue.  "  Your  little  chicaneries,  your  details 
of  actual  Hfe,  more  or  less  repellent  to  me,  would  draw  me 
from  the  sky.  One  dies  as  one  can.  I  will  think  of  death 
only  in  my  own  fashion.  What  matter  the  others  to  me  ? 
My  relations  to  the  others  will  soon  be  cut  short.  Please 
talk  to  me  no  more  of  those  people.     It  is  enough  to  see 


The  Novels  of  Stendhal  39 

the  judge  and  the  lawyer."  There  is  here  a  pride  of 
egoism,  a  power  of  self-justification,  that  mark  the  Napole- 
onic mind. 

Stendhal's  last  finished  novel,  The  Charii-euse  of  Fannaj 
is  said  to  have  been  written  immediately  after  The  Red  and 
the  Black,  during  the  year  1830.  It  was  not  published,  how- 
ever, till  1839,  for  Stendhal  always  liked  to  pose  as  a  literary 
dilettante  and  affected  indifference  to  his  literary  fame. 
His  contemporaries  generally  accepted  this  as  his  best 
work ;  and  that  is  still  the  usual  opinion,  though  some  nat- 
uralists see  a  more  faithful  reflection  of  their  methods  in 
The  Red  and  the  Black.  But  both  novels  are  heterogeneous 
and  difficult  to  classify.  In  both  there  are  pieces  of  nat- 
uralistic description  worthy  of  Zola,  and  touches  of  human 
pettiness  worthy  of  Flaubert,  with  bits  of  psychic  analysis 
that  might  delight  Bourget,  and,  especially  in  The  Chartreuse^ 
a  plentiful  dose  of  romantic  passion ;  while  to  all  these  ele- 
ments The  Chartreuse  added  still  another,  —  the  first  serious 
attempt  in  French  fiction  to  paint  not  alone  foreign  scenes 
but  foreign  ideals  and  foreign  life,  though  indeed  it  was  a 
life  as  familiar  and,  as  he  thought,  more  congenial  to  him 
than  that  of  France  itself.  Whether  the  picture  of  the 
Italy,  or  rather  the  Milan  of  Napoleon,  is  any  more  true  to 
nature  than  that  of  the  Faubourg  Saint-Germain  in  Armance^ 
might  be  hard  to  discover.  The  book  gives  the  impression 
of  crude  colours  and  melodramatic  exaggeration.  The 
Italy  of  his  ideal  seems  rather  that  of  Benvenuto  Cellini  or 
the  Borgias  than  that  of  the  nineteenth  century.  Four  per- 
sons fill  the  book  with  the  intensity  of  their  passion.  The 
Duchess  Sanseverina,  poisoner,  almost  incestuous,  —  quite 
after  the  author's  own  heart,  so  little  trace  remains  in  her 
of  commonplace  humanity,  —  is  the  worthy  sister  of  Balzac's 


40        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

Countess  of  Cadignan,  loving  with  her  whole  though  rather 
shop-worn  heart  her  nephew  Fabrice,  for  whose  sake  she 
kills  one  man,  marries  a  second,  and  gives  herself  to  a 
third;  a  lady  withal  whom  the  author  has  delighted  to 
endow  with  his  own  wit  and  an  aureole  of  beauty.  Her 
nephew  Fabrice  has  in  him  much  of  Stendhal  himself,  like 
Sorel,  but  with  a  less  original  flavour,  a  sort  of  Macchiavellian 
type  compounded  of  unscrupulous  shrewdness  and  of 
intense  energy.  The  collapse  of  the  Empire  leaves  the 
spirit  of  Fabrice  cribbed  and  confined.  Waterloo  has 
closed  to  him  the  career  of  military  ambition  ;  he  turns 
instinctively  to  the  Church,  and,  more  successful  than  Julien, 
ends  his  career  of  adventures  in  an  arch- episcopal  see.  His 
ethical  ideas  and  ideals  are,  however,  too  different  from  our 
own  to  allow  us  to  follow  with  sympathetic  interest  the  life 
of  one  who  behaves,  as  Sainte-Beuve  observes,  "like  an 
animal  given  over  to  his  appetites  or  like  a  wanton  child 
who  follows  his  caprices."  One  may  feel  a  certain  curious 
interest  in  his  conduct,  but  his  motives  are  too  foreign  to 
our  range  of  experience,  and  the  excessive  resort  to  duels, 
dungeons,  poisons,  and  other  such  chimeras  dire  of  romance 
provokes  a  repletion  of  melodramatic  effects. 

Another  noteworthy  character  in  The  Chartreuse  of 
Parma  is  Count  Mosca,  in  whom  Balzac  saw  a  sort  of  glo- 
rified Metternich,  "  to  create  whom  and  to  prove  the  crea- 
tion by  the  acts  themselves  of  the  creature,  to  make  him 
move  in  an  environment  fit  for  the  development  of  his  fac- 
ulties, was  the  work  not  of  a  man  but  of  a  fairy  and  an 
enchanter."  All  of  which  seems  to  mean  little  more  than 
that  Stendhal  gave  an  admirable  description  of  the  court  of 
Parma  and  of  the  tactics  of  a  shrewd  and  unscrupulous 
courtier  in  striving  to  reconcile  his  duties  with  his  lusts,  his 


The  Novels  of  Stendhal  41 

office  and  his  mistress.  The  ingenuity  of  the  intrigue  here 
is  admirable,  but  it  is  almost  painfully  tortuous  and  accords 
with  no  reality  that  we  know.  Then,  finally,  in  this  Italy 
of  cypress  and  myrtle,  of  poison  and  stiletto,  Stendhal  has 
painted  for  us  in  Palla  the  romantic  political  outlaw  who 
becomes  highwayman  by  necessity,  and  explains  to  the 
duchess  that  he  has  followed  her  "  like  a  savage  fascinated 
by  her  angelic  beauty.  It  was  so  long  since  he  had  seen 
two  white  hands."  This  philandering  highwayman  is 
methodical,  however.  He  keeps  a  memorandum  of  the  per- 
sons whom  he  robs,  and  after  reserving  twelve  hundred 
francs  as  a  reasonable  living  due  him  from  society,  he  returns 
the  rest  if  he  can.  To  the  duchess  he  seems  "  a  sublime 
man,"  especially  after  he  has  agreed  to  oblige  her  by  kill- 
ing an  acquaintance;  to  us  he  seems  another  impossible 
Hernani. 

So  in  these  four  characters  we  have  the  whole  novelistic 
scale,  ultra-romantic  passion,  adventure,  minute  realism, 
delicate  psychology,  each  in  turn,  seldom  combined,  and  all 
used  to  illustrate  Stendhal's  ideal  of  love  omnipotent,  un- 
reasoning, fatal,  one  is  almost  tempted  to  say  animal,  which 
is  the  dominant  note  also  in  his  shorter  stories,  such  as  The 
Abbess  of  Castro  (I'Abbesse  de  Castro,  1832)  or  San  Fran- 
cesco a  Ripaj  stories  that  he  averred  he  had  drawn  from  old 
family  records  of  the  fierce  passion  of  former  Romans,  — 
that  love  which  was,  he  said,  "a  delicious  flower,  that 
was  granted  to  him  alone  who  had  the  courage  to  go 
gather  it  on  the  tdgQ  of  a  fearful  abyss."  Here,  too,  there 
is  a  needless  "  supping  full  of  horrors "  that  the  reader  is 
glad  to  miss  in  the  unfinished  Green  Chasseur^  which 
promises  more  than  any  of  Stendhal's  completed  novels 
realise. 


42        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

In  The  Green  Chasseur,  as  in  the  other  novels,  the  hero 
is  Stendhal  himself  projected  by  the  novelist's  imagination 
into  a  new  environment.  Suppose  Henri  Beyle  had  been 
born  an  aristocrat?  he  seems  to  ask  in  Armance,  and  hav- 
ing worked  out  that  psychological  problem,  he  asks  himself, 
But  suppose  he  had  been  an  educated  plebeian  ?  and  he 
writes  The  Red  and  the  Black.  Then,  as  he  is  living  in 
Italy,  he  naturally  lets  his  imagination  picture  himself  as 
growing  up  in  that  environment,  and  we  have  The  Char- 
treuse of  Parma.  But  wherever  he  goes  in  the  Europe  of 
his  day  he  is  confronted  with  a  plutocracy,  self-assertive, 
cosmopohtan,  and  he  asks  himself:  How  if  Henri  Beyle 
had  been  a  banker's  son,  how  if  he  had  entered  the  army 
for  very  ennui  at  a  time  when  he  knew  it  could  offer  little 
but  the  daily  round  of  garrison  duties?  And  to  answer  this 
question  he  writes  The  Green  Chasseur.  And  if  Laf?iiel 
were  less  fragmentary,  we  should  doubtless  find  there  also 
a  like  impulse. 

Sainte-Beuve  calls  Stendhal  a  romantic  hussar.  He  was 
a  sort  of  literary  skirmisher,  a  dilettante,  who  belonged  to 
no  school  and  has  been  claimed  by  all.  When  he  is  con- 
tent to  deal  with  normal  human  nature,  his  analytic  powers 
produce  admirable  results,  but,  like  every  dilettante,  he  has 
an  instinctive  desire  to  exhibit  his  literary  virtuosity  on 
abnormal  characters  that  appeal  rather  to  psychologic 
curiosity  than  to  broadly  human  sympathy.  He  did  not 
see  life  steadily  nor  see  it  whole,  but  what  he  saw  he  de- 
scribed with  a  marvellous  minuteness  that  roused  the 
admiration  of  men  so  great  and  yet  so  different  as  Balzac 
and  Merim^e  in  his  own  day,  and  Zola  and  Bourget  in  ours. 
Never  widely  read  by  the  public,  he  is  still  closely  studied 
by  those  writers  of  fiction  who  take  their  vocation  seriously. 


The  Novels  of  Stendhal  43 

His  influence  on  the  style  and  general  spirit  or  pervading 
ideas  of  French  fiction  has  been  slight.  His  importance  in 
the  evolution  of  novelistic  processes  is  perhaps  greater  than 
that  of  any  writer  of  his  half-century,  except  of  course 
Balzac. 


CHAPTER   III 

THE   FICTION   OF    THE   ROMANTIC   SCHOOL 

THE  romantic  movement  in  France  was  less  the  result 
of  individual  genius  or  of  a  combination  of  cosmo- 
politan influences  than  of  a  national  state  of  mind.  The 
environment  of  gestation  and  childhood  surely  affects 
genius.  It  is  not  without  significance  that  of  the  writers 
who  gained  eminence  in  fiction  between  1820  and  1840 
three  were  born  before  the  ascendency  of  Bonaparte,  twelve 
during  the  Consulate,  and  nine  others  during  the  four  trium- 
phant years  that  culminated  in  the  interview  at  Erfurt ;  while 
the  seven  years  that  separate  Erfurt  from  Waterloo,  the 
descending  action  of  that  gigantic  drama,  count  but  five 
distinguished  names,  and  the  first  five  years  of  the  Restora- 
tion but  one.  Of  the  noveUsts  born  before  the  fall  of  the 
Empire  seven  stand  out  clearly  as  superior  in  genius,  though 
not  necessarily  in  popularity.  Of  these  Stendhal  had  been 
old  enough  to  take  active  part  in  the  Napoleonic  cam- 
paigns. He  looked  at  the  romantic  spirit  from  outside,  and 
made  it  the  subject  of  his  psychological  analysis.  Balzac 
had  been  segregated  in  his  youth,  and  did  not  therefore 
affiliate  himself  completely  with  the  romantic  movement, 
though  he  did  not  wholly  escape  it.  Vigny,  Hugo,  and 
Dumas  were  the  sons  of  soldiers,  and  could  not  but  inherit 
the  spirit  of  those  epic  days.  George  Sand,  too,  was  the 
daughter  of  an  officer  and  first- fruit  of  a  marriage  that  was 


Fiction  of  the  Romantic  School      45 


itself  a  romance  ;  while  M^rim^e,  who  stands  a  little  outside 
the  romantic  current,  was  of  civilian  and  partly  English  blood. 
These  five  grew  up  in  an  atmosphere  of  magnani- 
mous emotions,  of  the  great  Napoleonic  ^pop^e  with  its 
soul-stirring  messages  of  victory  and  defeat,  and  from  this 
they  passed,  when  already  old  enough  to  feel  it,  into  an 
atmosphere  of  political  repression  where  their  overwrought 
imagination  naturally  sought  a  vent  in  fantastic  ideals.  "  I 
belong,"  says  Vigny,  "to  that  generation  born  with  the 
century,  that  was  fed  by  the  Emperor  with  bulletins  and 
had  before  it  always  a  naked  sword  which  it  was  about  to 
seize  at  the  very  moment  when  France  re-sheathed  it  in  the 
Bourbon  scabbard.  .  .  .  Even  our  schoolmasters  read  us 
constantly  bulletins  from  the  Grand  Army,  and  our  hurrahs 
for  the  Emperor  interrupted  Tacitus  and  Plato.  Our 
teachers  were  like  heralds  at  arms,  our  studies  like  barracks, 
our  recitations  like  manceuvres,  and  our  examinations  like 
reviews.  .  .  .  Even  now  I  am  not  far  from  a  relapse,  so 
deep  are  the  impressions  of  infancy  and  so  well  was  the 
burning  mark  of  the  Roman  eagle  engraved  on  our  hearts." 
But  Musset  and  Gautier,  who  were  four  and  three  years  old 
when  the  RestoratYon  came,  felt  this  less,  and  more  of  the 
foreboding  of  catastrophe.  So  it  seems  to  Musset,  in  his 
Confession,  as  though  «  during  the  Empire,  while  husbands 
and  fathers  were  in  Germany,  anxious  mothers  brought  into 
the  world  a  pale  and  nervous  generation,"  to  grow  up  after 
Leipzig  and  Waterloo,  "weighted  with  care  in  a  ruined 
world"  and  "struggling  to  fill  their  lungs  with  the  air 
Napoleon  had  breathed."  So  Musset  makes  shipwreck  of 
his  life  in  a  passionate  effort  to  grasp  an  illusive  ideal,  and 
Gautier  seeks  escape  from  the  real  in  the  realm  of  art  and 
phantasy. 


46        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

Of  course  it  would  be  easy  to  overstress  the  power  of  this 
political  environment,  of  which  the  effect  varied  with  the 
personality.  Yet  it  is  an  element  not  to  be  neglected,  and 
to  it  must  be  added  the  natural  reaction  toward  royalism 
and  medievalism  after  the  intense  modernity  of  the  Napo- 
leonic political  life.  But  as  a  popular  state  of  mind  this 
reactionary  sentiment  yields  under  Charles  X.  to  a  general 
warmth  of  democratic  sympathy  that  finds  its  natural  ex- 
pression in  the  Revolution  of  1830.  Add  to  this  a  third 
element,  the  result  in  part  of  the  other  two,  and  we  shall 
have  the  main  factors  of  romanticism.  This  is  the  "  world- 
pain  "  of  Chateaubriand,  modified  somewhat  perhaps  by 
Werther  and  Childe  Harold^  but  still  essentially  the  woe  of 
Ren^,  the  heart-sickness  of  all  who  can  find  in  the  real 
world  nothing  to  correspond  to  ideals  that  they  are  alike 
impotent  to  attain  or  to  banish.  "  We  are  your  true  sons, 
Ren^,"  says  Sainte-Beuve.  "  Our  infancy  has  been  troubled 
by  your  dreams,  our  youth  agitated  by  your  restlessness, 
and  the  same  north  wind  has  borne  us  upward." 

Now,  to  be  a  child  of  Ren6  is  to  allow  one's  imagination 
to  be  guided  more  by  feeling  than  by  reason ;  and  this  the 
typical  romanticists  illustrate  in  their  treatment  of  nature 
and  in  their  style.  Nature  to_  them  is  no  longer,  as  it  had 
been  to  Rousseau  and  to  Bemardin,  "  material  for  sensa- 
tions and  a  pretext  for  descriptions,  a  sort  of  magnificent 
cradle  prepared  by  God  for  his  privileged  creatures."  In 
Chateaubriand  first,  but  still  more  in  the  poet-novelists  and 
in  George  Sand,  creation  takes  on  an  independent  life,  the 
material  world  becomes  a  symbol  of  an  ethical  or  hedonistic 
ideal.  And  since  this  view  of  nature  is  the  product  of 
individual  fancy,  the  fabric  of  a  vision,  it  will  finS  its 
natural  expression  in  lyric  declamation,  in  strained  or  gro- 


Fiction  of  the  Romantic  School      47 

tesque  imagery,  and  in  weird  or  exotic  scenes  in  which  the 
fancy  can  riot  at  will.  So  the  romantic  imagination  will 
eagerly  sup  full  of  horrors  and  cast  itself  with  delight  into 
the  vortex  of  crime. 

The  germs  of  this  "world  pain"  were  in  the  French! 
Revolution,  but  their  development  was  aided  by  foreign 
influences.  This  was  a  generation  in  which,  as  Goethe  has 
told  us,  Ossian  had  supplanted  Homer  and  Macpherson's 
wildly  grandiose  visions  passed  for  current  coin  of  "  emo- 
tion in  its  state  of  nature."  This  influence,  combined  with 
the  melancholy  morgue  of  Young,  affected  poetry  more 
than  prose,  but  is  obvious  enough,  for  instance,  in  Hugo's 
Han  of  Iceland  (Han  dTslande,  1823).  Much  more  wide- 
reaching,  however,  was  the  development  of  the  historic 
sense  that  the  French  owed  to  the  Waverley  Novels,  those 
picturesque  re-creations  of  the  past  to  which  the  French 
echoes  are  Notre-Dame  (1830)  and  Cinq- Mars  (1826). 
Then,  too,  Byron  by  his  heroic  devotion  and  death  had  lent 
a  dignity  to  romantic  despair  that  Chateaubriand  could  not 
give  to  Ren^  because  he  did  not  have  it  to  bestow. 

Byron  had  died  in  1824,  and  from  1826  onward  the 
tendency  to  the  fantastic  already  obvious  in  Nodier  was 
strengthened  by  the  increasing  vogue  of  the  German  ro- 
manticist Hoffmann,  whom  in  1828  the  Globe,  the  literary 
organ  of  the  romanticists,  hailed  as  the  ne  plus  ultra  of  "the 
bizarre  and  the  true,  the  pathetic  and  the  terrible,  the 
monstrous  and  the  burlesque."  Hoff'mann,  as  later  our 
own  Poe,  attracted  the  French  because  his  racial  qualities 
enabled  him  to  excel  the  Latins  on  the  side  to  which  for 
the  moment  they  inchned.  Hoff"mann  had  more  readers 
in  France  than  Goethe  or  Heine.  He  probably  has  more 
there  to-day  than  in  Germany.     Naturally  popularity  pro- 


48        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

voked  imitation.  One  finds  it,  tacit  or  avowed,  in  Hugo, 
Gautier,  Musset,  Sand,  Balzac,  to  be  silent  of  a  host  of 
minor  writers  and  feuilletonists.  For  the  decade  of  1830 
Hoffmann  directed  French  romanticism.  He  greatly  fur- 
thered its  inherent  tendency  toward  a  confusion  of  moral 
and  esthetic  ideas.  What  was  to  him  a  nebulous  dream 
became  to  them  a  sharply  defined  vision.  What  in  him 
had  been  grotesque  or  eccentric  becomes  in  them  ghastly 
and  monstrous.  To  see,  however,  that  Hoffmann  did  not 
originate  the  movement  that  he  accelerated,  one  need  only 
consider  the  striking  combination  of  all  the  elemen-ts  we 
have  been  considering  in  the  later  novels  of  Nodier  and 
in  the  fiction  of  Victor  Hugo. 

If  a  group  of  writers  can  be  called  a  school  whose  only 
bond  of  fellowship  is  a  general  union  of  total  dissent,  the 
schoolmaster  of  the  romanticists  would  be  the  genial 
Charles  Nodier  (i  783-1844),  and  their  schoolroom  his 
librarian's  salon  at  the  Arsenal,  where  from  about  the  year 
1823  the  leaders  of  that  movement  were  wont  to  gather. 
At  first  the  more  prominent  members  were  the  critic  Sainte- 
Beuve,  the  poet  Vigny,  and  those  diligent  translators  the 
brothers  Deschamps.  Later  Hugo  allied  himself  to  them, 
and  from  about  1826  this  group,  calling  itself  the  Caiacle, 
became  a  more  or  less  purposeful  *' log-rolling  society," 
from  which  Sainte-Beuve  thought  it  wise  to  withdraw,  while 
they  drew  to  themselves  the  less  steadfast  and  thorough- 
going adhesion  of  Musset  and  Gautier. 

Nodier  was  by  far  the  oldest  of  this  group,  yet  in  his 
sympathy  he  was  ever  young,  and  so  he  could  form  a  rally- 
ing-point  for  all,  and  he  helped  all  with  sympathy  and 
counsel  to  the  last.  His  novels  are  less  interesting  to  us 
than   his   personality,   yet   they  are   not  without   interest. 


Fiction  of  the  Romantic  School      49 

Others  before  him  had  shown  clear  marks  of  the  influence 
of  English  fiction,  but  he  was  the  first  to  make  the  fiction  of 
Germany  and  more  especially  the  Sorrows  of  Werther  felt  in 
France.  His  literary  talent  seems  to  have  been  dispersed 
rather  than  arrested  by  the  influences  of  the  Napoleonic 
epoch,  and  the  result  is  a  puzzling  mixture.  Naturally 
gifted  with  a  fanciful  imagination,  he  was  constrained  to 
pass  the  formative  years  of  his  genius  in  a  time  of  repres- 
sion, when  the  only  great  writers,  Stael  and  Chateaubriand, 
-are  those  whose  minds  were  already  formed,  whom  the  Em- 
pire could  not  bend  and  did  not  break.  So  it  happened 
that  Nodier  became  a  polygraph.  He  wrote,  and  wrote 
well,  on  science,  history,  criticism,  philology;  and  already 
as  a  youth  he  seems  to  have  meditated  fiction  and  found 
absorbing  delight  in  Werther  and  Shakspere.  When,  in 
1800,  he  left  his  native  Besangon  for  Paris,  he  had  already 
begun  two  imitations  of  Goethe's  novel.  The  Exiles  (les 
Proscrits,  1802),  and  The  Salzburg  Artist  (le  Peintre  de 
Saltzbourg,  1803),  the  latter  aptly  characterised  by  its  sec- 
ond title,  "Journal  of  the  Emotions  of  a  Suffering  Heart." 
But  though  both  novels  are  more  declamatory  and  more 
fatalistically  romantic  than  Werther,  we  must  not  be  the 
dupe  of  Nodier.  He  was  quite  capable  of  writing  in  the 
same  year  Meditations  from  the  Cloister  and  the  lively,  not 
to  say  Pantagruelistic  Last  Chapter  of  my  Novel  (Dernier 
chapitre  de  mon  roman,  1803),  to  afford  us  a  reassuring 
witness  that  he  was  safe  from  all  morbidity.  Except  for 
this,  however,  his  novels  written  during  the  Consulate  are  in 
the  key  of  Ren^,  Delphine,  and  Obermann  ;  but  his  senti- 
mentality has  in  it  more  of  the  German,  which  he  derived  in 
part  from  the  translation  of  Werther  that  had  been  made  in 
1776,  and  in  part  from  other  translations  preserved  to  liter- 

4 


50        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

ary  memory  only  because  of  their  contribution  to  forming 
the  new  cosmopolitan  emotion  that  Nodier  expressed. 

For  in  these  early  novels  he  preaches  with  graceful  lan- 
guor the  desperate  melancholy  that  he  mocked  with  such 
verve  in  the  Last  Chapter.  Yet  all  of  them  have  the  ster- 
ling mark  of  a  studied  style,  and  there  are  passages  in  them 
that  would  surely  be  commonplaces  of  the  anthologies  if 
Rousseau  or  Chateaubriand  had  had  the  good  fortune  to 
write  them.  But  by  1818  Nodier  had  thoroughly  outgrown 
WertheVy  and  had  ceased  to  nurse  his  fancy  on  suicides  and 
funerals.  So  Jea7i  Sbogar  (181 8),  a  tale  of  a  chivalrous 
Illyrian  brigand,  has  in  it  much  more  of  the  fresh  breezy 
spirit  of  Rob  Roy  than  of  the  conventional  melancholy  of 
Rene  ;  and  the  stories  that  follow,  Ruthwen  (1820),  Smarra 
(1821),  Trilby  (1822),  are  thorough  bits  of  romantic 
fancy,  conceived  in  the  spirit  of  Fouque's  Undine,  of  Bur- 
ger's Leonore,  and  of  the  fantastic  tales  of  Hoffmann.  Thus 
they  are  the  forerunners  of  what  is  most  charming  in  the 
work  of  the  romanticists  of  the  thirties,  while  Nodier  him- 
self continued  to  sound  the  keynote  in  such  exquisite  little 
masterpieces  as  The  Crumb-Fairy  (la  F^e  aux  miettes, 
1832),  Sister  Beatrice  (Soeur  Beatrix,  1838),  The  Chande- 
lier (la  Chandelier,  1839),  and  Brisquefs  Dog  (le  Chien 
de  Brisquet,  1844).  But  while  these  stories  stretch  out 
one  hand  to  the  romanticists,  they  reach  back  the  other  to 
Voltaire.  In  Nodier  the  short  story  that  had  been  neg- 
lected since  the  rise  of  Rousseau  returns  with  all  its  insinu- 
ating grace  and  quite  without  its  sting.  This,  then,  is  the 
significance  of  Nodier,  that  he  unites  in  himself  and  trans- 
fers to  the  fiction  of  the  romanticists  the  Voltairian  conte, 
the  English  romance,  and  the  German  sentimental  tale, 
working  by  example,  by  personal  counsel,  and  by  printed 


Fiction  of  the  Romantic  School      51 

criticism,  to  stimulate  in  their  first  efforts  Lamartine,  Hugo, 
aftd  the  brilliant  train  that  followed,  whose  fiction  we  have 
now  to  consider. 

The  father  of  Victor  Hugo  (i  802-1 885)  was  a  bold  gen- 
eral of  the  Republic  and  the  Empire,  his  mother  was  a  Breton 
Catholic,  and  thus  he  inherited  an  imagination  at  once 
emotional  and  grandiose.  These  predispositions  were  fos- 
tered in  his  youth,  first  by  his  stay  in  Spain  and  the  weird 
experiences  of  his  life  there  in  a  convent  school,  of  which 
there  are  traces  in  his  work  from  the  Bug- Jar  gal  (18 18)  to 
Torquemada  (1882),  and  second  by  several  years  spent  in 
romantic  yet  urban  retirement  with  his  mother  in  the  aban- 
doned convent  of  the  Feuillantines  at  Paris,  of  which  he  has 
left  a  beautiful  account  in  his  poems.  So  it  happened  that  at 
fourteen  he  showed  an  unmistakable  aversion  from  mathemat- 
ics, technological  studies,  and  indeed  from  any  facts  of  which 
his  imagination  could  not  make  its  sport,  and  recorded  in 
his  diary  his  aspiration  "  to  be  Chateaubriand  or  nothing." 

Seldom  was  the  wish  of  youth  more  completely  fulfilled. 
He  had  more  than  Chateaubriand's  poetic  power,  he  could 
touch  deeper  and  stronger  chords  of  feeling,  his  style  was 
capable  at  once  of  grander  heights  of  eloquence  and  of 
gentler  strains  of  pathos.  But  with  these  qualities  he  had 
also  their  faults,  —  a  veritable  gift  of  inaccuracy,  that  makes 
him  almost  valueless  as  a  witness  in  regard  to  the  facts  or 
dates  of  his  own  productions,  an  almost  comic  sincerity  of 
conviction  that  his  exclamatory  eloquence  is  orphic  wis- 
dom, and  a  profound  conceit  whose  fatuousness  can  be  sur- 
mised rather  than  fathomed  by  a  line  in  which  the  aged 
poet  invites  the  Deity  to  discuss  a  matter  with  him  for  their 
mutual  edification. 

As  a  school-boy  Hugo  won  distinction  for  his  poetiy,  and 


52        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

became  associated  with  a  group  of  literary  friends  of  his 
brother  Abel.  In  1818  he  wrote,  or  at  least  he  says  that  he 
wrote,  his  first  novel,  Bug-Jargni,  a  story  of  the  Haytian 
revolution  of  1794,  which,  after  being  expanded  to  some 
four  times  its  original  length,  was  first  published  in  1825. 
The  earlier  story  has  the  exaggeration  and  the  grotesque 
gruesomeness  that  belong  to  the  romantic  conception  of 
fiction,  but  it  lacks  what  was  to  be  the  mainspring  of  the 
longer  tale,  as  of  nearly  all  the  fiction  of  Hugo,  —  a  passion 
so  ill-assorted  as  to  lead  inevitably  to  tragedy.  In  this  earlier 
version  both  composition  and  style  are  in  their  infancy ;  but 
it  is  the  infancy  of  Hercules,  a  fancy  running  glorious  riot 
in  scenes  of  wanton  horror. 

The  second  Bug-Ja7'gal  is  keyed  to  a  higher  pitch,  but 
it  is  more  mature.  New  motive  and  intensity  is  given  to 
passion,  and  contrast  between  grotesque  and  pathetic  is 
pushed  to  the  uttermost,  marking  a  decided  advance  on 
the  Han  of  Iceland  (Han  d'Islande)   of  1823. 

This  last  is  a  story  of  Norway,  and  an  attempt  at  histori- 
cal evocation  in  the  manner  suggested,  as  Hugo  expressly 
tells  us,  by  Scott.  The  scenes  were  to  be  "pictures  m 
which  description  should  supply  the  decoration  and  the 
costumes."  But  the  effort  to  produce  this  vivid  visual 
impression  is  too  obvious.  The  diction  pants  and  heaves. 
The  confusion  of  genres  is  pushed  here,  as  afterward  in 
Hugo's  dramas,  to  a  point  where  it  aims  to  add  to  epic 
effects  not  alone  those  of  lyric  and  drama  but  of  the  plastic 
arts  as  well.  In  this  attempt  failure  was  certain,  and  the 
story  is  far  inferior  to  the  final  Bug-Jargal.  And  yet  this 
tale  of  a  double-skulled  monster  and  his  hardly  less  human 
consort,  a  polar  bear,  who  together  destroy  piecemeal  a 
regiment,  after  which  Han  bums  himself  to   death   that 


Fiction  of  the  Romantic  School      53 

he  may  consume  in  flame  the  castle  of  his  captors,  has 
a  force  that  proclaims  a  coming  master  in  tales  of  terror 
and  daring.  It  has  also  the  humour  that  comes  from  the 
grotesquely  incongruous ;  and  if  its  pathos  seem  painfully 
morbid  and  false,  this  was  a  fault  of  the  time  rather  than 
of  Hugo.  "  Few  men,"  said  Nodier,  *'  begin  with  such 
errors,  and  leave  for  critics  only  those  faults  that  they 
have  voluntarily  committed." 

Such  criticism  as  this  was  then  most  welcome,  for 
classicism  still  predominated  among  reviewers,  though 
romanticism  was  gaining  control  of  the  stage  and  of  fash- 
ion. Classical  writers  were  more  praised,  but  romantic 
books  were  more  read.  Nodier  notes  that  "  the  most  dis- 
tinguished work  of  the  good  school  does  not  for  a  moment 
share  the  irresistible  vogue  of  the  often  very  extravagant 
reveries  that  swarm  in  the  bad."  The  fashion  was  set 
already  toward  the  strange  and  exotic,  toward  "  gilded 
chivalry,  the  pretty  medievalism  of  chatelaines,  pages,  and 
god-mothers,  the  Christianity  of  chapels  and  hermits." 
During  the  years  between  Bitg-Jargal  (1825)  and  Notre- 
Danie  (1830),  this  medievalism  with  its  symboHc  treat- 
ment of  nature  developed  very  rapidly  in  Hugo,  and  found 
its  most  remarkable  expression  in  this  latter  work,  the 
finest  prose  of  his  early  period,  and  the  only  other  novel 
written  before  his  exile  save  for  the  short  pieces  of  criminal 
psychology,  The  Last  Day  of  a  Conde?nned  Man  (le  Dernier 
jour  d'un  condamn^,  1829)  and  Claude  Gueux  (1834), 
both  pleas,  as  eloquent  as  they  were  impracticable,  for  the 
abolition  of  the  death  penalty,  —  a  subject  to  which  Hugo 
recurred  in  season  and  out  of  season  during  his  whole 
literary  career. 

Notre-Dame  is  a  novel  gothic  in  subject,  in  imagination, 


54        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

in  treatment,  and  in  style.  It  mingles  the  noble  and  the 
base,  the  heroic  and  the  grotesque,  as  though  the  aim  of  the 
author  were  to  cover  the  whole  range  of  human  sentiment 
and  to  discover  a  physical  symbol  for  every  human  feeling 
and  passion.  The  story  is  of  the  slightest,  hardly  as  elabo- 
rate as  Bug-Jargalf  and  the  characters  are  essentially  the 
same.  Here  the  preferred  lover  is  the  gay  Phoebus; 
Frollo,  the  priest  loving  with  furious  hopeless  fatality  of 
passion  in  spite  of  learning  and  vows,  replaces  Bug,  the 
negro  prince ;  and  the  hunchback  Habribrah  of  the  former 
tale  becomes  the  hunchback  Quasimodo,  the  bell-ringer, 
who  also  loves  desperately  in  despite  of  deformity.  And 
to  all  these  the  gypsy  girl,  the  daintily  romantic  Esmeralda, 
is  what  the  aristocratic  planter's  daughter  was  to  those, 
though  of  course  the  situations  here  are  managed  with  far 
higher  art  and  more  complete  tragic  pathos.  For  Marie 
found  satisfaction  in  her  love,  while  the  devotion  of  Esme- 
ralda was  unscrupulously  exploited  by  the  gay  light-o'-love 
soldier,  until  she  perished  at  last  as  a  sorceress  through  the 
jealous  intervention  of  an  old  hag,  who  discovered  too  late 
that  she  has  compassed  the  death  of  her  own  child,  —  a 
situation  that  in  its  essential  features  recurs  several  times  in 
Hugo's  dramas. 

But  it  is  not  in  the  story  that  our  interest  lies.  Far 
more  real,  far  more  living  than  any  of  these  characters 
is  the  great  cathedral,  the  ever-recurring  symbol  of  the 
society  over  which  it  broods,  throwing  over  all  its  weird 
and  sombre  shadow.  This  device,  essentially  epic,  has 
never  been  managed  with  greater  effect  in  fiction,  though 
it  has  been  attempted  by  Zola  and  Daudet  with  great  effect, 
as  well  as  by  Huysmans  and  Loti.  But  besides  this  forebod- 
ing presage  in  the  cathedral,  the  grotesque  side  of  medie- 


Fiction  of  the  Romantic  School      55 

val  life  is  unveiled  in  that  strange  Miracle  Court  (  Cour  des 
miracles) ,  a  social  cesspool  of  beggars  and  criminals,  where 
the  lame  grow  nimble  and  the  blind  see,  that  they  may- 
share  in  nightly  orgies  in  which  Hugo  combines  the  super- 
stitions, the  customs,  and  the  thieves'  talk  of  the  submerged 
of  many  nations  to  give  us  the  illusion  of  a  realistic,  exotic 
phantasmagoria,  approached  in  French  literature  only  by 
some  chapters  of  Gautier's  Captain  Fracasse  (le  Capitaine 
Fracasse,  1863). 

It  is  here,  where  author  and  reader  alike  forget  the 
thread  of  the  story,  that  Hugo  is  at  his  best ;  and  his 
best  is  so  good,  so  vivid  that  we  hardly  pause  to  ask 
whether  it  is  true.  No  scholarly  investigations  can  under- 
mine the  structure  of  Hugo's  fancy,  nor  can  the  dust  of 
documents  mar  its  bright  colouring.  For  us  and  for  genera- 
tions to  come  the  Paris  of  Louis  XI.  will  be  the  Paris 
of  Esmeralda.  The  popularity  of  the  story  was  immediate 
and  great,  and  its  effect  has  been  lasting,  for  it  is  from 
Notre-Dame  that  we  may  date  the  revival  in  France  of 
that  interest  in  ancient  buildings  and  monuments,  to  arouse 
which  Hugo  then  regarded  "  one  of  the  chief  ends  of  his 
book  and  indeed  of  his  life."  Of  course  there  is  in  Notre- 
DamCy  as  always  in  Hugo,  an  occasional  ring  of  false  dec- 
lamation, and  a  straining  or  even  a  panting  for  effect ;  but 
it  is  less  felt  here  than  in  the  novels  of  the  later  period,  and 
as  a  piece  of  reproductive  imagination  Notre-Dame  de- 
serves not  only  the  first  place  in  Hugo's  fiction,  but  a  high 
rank  among  the  novels  of  the  world. 

An  interval  of  thirty-one  years  separates  Notre-Dame 
from  Hugo's  next  contribution  to  fiction,  Les  Mis^rables  of 
1862,  which  was  succeeded  in  1866  by  The  Toilers  of  the 
Sea  (les  Travailleurs  de  la  mer).     The  Man  who  Laughs 


56        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

(rHomme  qui  rit)  followed  in  1869,  ^^^  ^^^  'ist  is  closed 
by  Niitety-Three  (Quatre-vingt-treize)  in  1874.  But  all 
these  stories  are  of  this  later  period  in  date  alone.  In 
their  manner,  rhetoric,  and  diction  they  are  as  romantic 
as  Notre-Dame^  and  belong  to  a  type  of  fiction  even  more 
discredited  in  their  day  than  it  is  in  ours.  As  has  been 
well  said,  here  as  in  his  poetry,  Hugo  "  barred  the  current 
of  evolution,  he  did  not  deflect  it ;  "  and  it  is  more  fitting 
to  consider  these  novels  of  the  sixties  and  seventies  with 
those  of  the  thirties  than  with  their  own  contemporary 
fiction. 

Yet  between  Notre-Dame  and  such  historical  novels  as 
The  Man  who  Laughs  or  Niiiety-Three ,  and  even  more 
between  that  prose  epic  and  the  novels  of  contemporary 
life,  Les  Miserables  and  The  Toilers  of  the  Sea^  there  is  sharp 
contrast  in  political  views  and  social  sympathies.  The 
young  Hugo  had  been  more  or  less  royalist.  Catholic, 
medieval ;  the  political  experiences  of  a  decade  made 
him  a  social  democrat.  Like  Antaeus  thrown  to  earth, 
he  gathered  new  strength  of  conviction  and  of  utterance 
from  his  exile;  though  his  enthusiasm,  like  that  of  the 
Revolution  of  1848,  was  as  vague  as  it  was  intense,  as 
untrained  as  it  was  generous.  He  seemed  to  imagine  that 
he  had  a  gospel  of  social  salvation  to  proclaim  to  the  world, 
and  he  proclaimed  it  with  such  serious  emphasis  that  many 
were  found  to  take  it  at  his  valuation.  "  So  long,"  he  says 
in  his  preface  to  Les  MiserableSy  "  as  there  shall  exist 
through  the  fault  of  our  laws  and  customs  a  social  condem- 
nation that  creates  artificial  hells  in  the  midst  of  our  civili- 
sation and  complicates  a  divine  destiny  by  human  fatalism  j 
so  long  as  the  three  problems  of  the  century — the  degra- 
dation of  man  by  the  proletariat,  the  fall  of  woman  through 


Fiction  of  the  Romantic  School      57 

hunger,  the  arrested  development  of  the  child  by  ignorance 
—  are  not  solved ;  so  long  as  social  asphyxia  is  possible  in 
any  place,  —  in  other  words  and  from  a  wider  point  of  view, 
so  long  as  there  shall  be  ignorance  and  misery  on  earth, 
books  hke  this  cannot  be  useless." 

Hugo  is  doubtless  in  earnest,  but  his  work  can  hardly  be 
regarded  seriously.  It  is  a  chaos  of  all  genres  and  all 
subjects.  Taking  for  his  philosophic  background  the  not 
precisely  original  idea  that  voluntary  expiation  and  repent- 
ance will  produce  a  moral  regeneration  and  so  reveal  to 
the  soul  a  higher  life,  he  uses  this  background  to  set  off 
humanitarian  declamations  and  a  sentimental  social  democ- 
racy. Not  content  with  this,  he  imports  into  his  novel 
antiquarian  lore,  political  reminiscences,  studies  in  dialect 
and  slang,  emotionally  realistic  slumming,  scenes  of  battle 
and  riot,  the  most  impassioned  lyric  appeals,  the  most 
Insipid  idyllic  banality,  and  the  most  puerile  symbolism. 
The  whole  is  a  chaos  in  ten  volumes  of  passion,  beauty, 
aspiration,  and  of  a  bathos  that  is  simply  cyclopean. 

The  characters,  as  we  should  expect  from  such  a  lyric 
novel,  are  not  based  on  observation  nor  correlated  to  the 
life  of  this  planet.  Its  hero,  Valjean,  ex-convict,  manu- 
facturer, and  philanthropist,  is  a  thoroughly  romantic  self- 
contradiction,  a  Utopian  without  wisdom  or  prudence, 
whose  magnanimity  would  be  as  unnatural  and  as  futile  in 
real  life  as  it  is  surely  wearisome  in  romance.  And  just  as 
in  Hugo's  dramas  characters  enter  proclaiming,  "I  am 
Murder  and  Vengeance,"  so  here  we  are  told  that  the 
grisette  Famine  is  a  symbol  of  joy  and  modesty ;  Marius  is 
always  posing  for  what  Hugo  pretended  he  had  been  in 
1830  and  was  not, — a  type  of  youthful  energy,  nursing 
democratic  aspirations  on  imperial  memories;  Enjolras  is 


58        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

the  typical  intransigent,  whose  fundamental  imbecility  it 
was  left  to  Flaubert  to  exhibit  ad  nauseam  in  his  Sentimen- 
tal Education  (1869).  Javert  is  the  incarnation  of  social 
order,  and  Cosette  is  the  ideal  romantic  young  lady,  some- 
what childish  in  her  sentimentality.  Not  one  of  them  all 
has  the  life  of  the  scoundrel  Thernardier  or  of  that  precious 
street  urchin  Gavroche. 

As  in  Notre-Dame  it  is  the  digressions  and  sermons  that 
best  reward  the  reader  in  this  chaplet  of  scenes  loosely 
strung  on  the  life  of  Jean  Valjean.  The  psychology  is 
feeble,  but  we  are  shown  with  much  feeling  the  veil  of 
ostracism  that  separates  the  discharged  prisoner  from 
society  and  almost  forces  him  to  crime.  The  early  volumes 
seem  most  deeply  felt,  and  on  the  whole  are  the  best.  In 
the  body  of  the  work,  in  the  account  of  the  youth  and 
student  days  of  Marius,  there  are  touches  of  autobiography, 
and  from  this  the  novel  sinks  to  its  lowest  depth  in  the 
prolix  senility  of  the  loves  of  Marius  and  Cosette.  But  no 
one  of  its  ten  volumes  is  without  individual  scenes  of  great 
power,  and  the  escape  of  Valjean  from  Thernardier,  his 
flight  through  the  sewers,  the  defence  of  the  barricade,  and, 
above  all,  Waterloo,  reveal  the  poetic  genius  of  Hugo  in 
its  glory.  Yet,  if  one  take  the  work  as  a  whole,  one  must 
agree  with  Flaubert  that  it  has  neither  truth  nor  grandeur. 

The  Toilers  of  the  Sea  (les  Travailleurs  de  la  mer) 
is  rather  a  prose  poem  than  a  novel.  Its  interest  is  almost 
wholly  epic  and  lyric,  and  its  inspiration  is  obviously  the 
poet's  residence  on  the  Channel  island  of  Guernsey.  Here 
he  informs  the  reader  it  is  his  purpose  to  show  how  the 
fatality  of  inanimate  nature  "  is  mingled  with  the  supreme 
fatality,  the  human  heart."  As  a  matter  of  fact  the  des- 
perate love  of  Gilliat   for   Deruchette,  his   devotion   and 


Fiction  of  the  Romantic  School      59 

suicide,  show  no  such  thing,  but  only  her  lack  of  common 
honesty  and  his  lack  of  common-sense.  As  in  Les  Mise- 
radleSy  the  interest  is  neither  in  the  story  nor  in  the  psy- 
chology, but  in  the  marvellous  descriptions  of  the  sea, 
where  Hugo's  prose  throbs  and  thrills  with  the  far-sound- 
ing waves.  But  for  this  it  was  not  necessary  to  write  a 
novel,  and  as  a  whole  The  Toilers  is  as  inferior  to  Notre- 
Dame  or  Les  Miserables  as  it  is  superior  to  The  Maft  who 
Laughs  (I'Homme  qui  rit),  where  with  strange  perver- 
sity Hugo  imported  to  the  court  of  the  English  Elizabeth 
the  manners  of  Nan  of  Lceland  and  produced  an  abortion 
which  it  is  but  charity  to  bury  in  silence. 

On  the  other  hand  Hugo's  last  novel,  Ninety-Three 
(Quatre-vingt-treize),  is  in  many  ways  his  best,  for  here  at 
last  he  found  a  period  suited  above  all  others  to  his  genius, 
and  of  which  he  had  as  it  were  an  hereditary  knowledge. 
The  scene  is  Vendue  in  the  crucial  year  of  the  first  Republic, 
and  into  it  Hugo  has  put  a  more  intense  palpitating  life 
and  a  truer  tragic  catastrophe  than  he  ever  attained  else- 
where, though  the  novel  is  marred  by  the  mannerisms  of 
age  and  his  usual  looseness  of  construction.  It  was  a  time 
that  produced  and  justified  the  extreme  natures  and  sharp 
contrasts  in  which  Hugo  excelled;  and  if  Cimourdin  is 
still  a  lifeless  type,  Gauvin  and  Lantenac  are  flesh-and- 
blood  men,  neither  too  heroic  nor  too  sentimental  for  their 
time.  Yet  here,  as  always  in  Hugo's  novels,  what  leaves 
the  deepest  and  freshest  impress  on  the  mind  are  the 
episodes  and  the  minor  characters,  pictures  of  Paris  in 
revolution,  the  weird  procession  of  the  guillotine,  the 
cannon  aboard  ship  broken  loose  and  dealing  destruction, 
battle  scenes,  the  grisly  old  trooper  Radoub,  and  the  peas- 
ant woman's  children  whose  prattle  runs  like  a  golden 


6o        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

thread  through  these  scenes  of  fire  and  blood.  Judged  by 
the  canons  of  fiction,  both  for  what  it  is  and  for  what  it 
avoids,  this  is  the  best  of  Hugo's  novels ;  judged  as  a  com- 
bination of  epic,  lyric,  idyllic,  realistic,  didactic,  oratoric, 
and  philosophic  story- telling,  it  is  less  unique  than  Les 
MiserableSy  and  it  never  attains  that  novel's  highest  reaches. 
In  historic  fiction  Hugo's  only  important  rival  among 
the  romanticists  was  Alfred  de  Vigny,  who  published  be- 
tween 1826  and  1835  three  volumes  that  represent  the 
rising  tide  of  romanticism  and  also  the  unique  personality 
of  their  author.  He  was  of  noble  blood  and  strongly 
royalistic  sympathies.  Therefore  at  the  Restoration  he  made 
haste  to  enlist  in  the  army,  and  remained  connected  with 
it  for  thirteen  years,  during  which  his  nearest  approach  to 
the  active  service  that  he  ardently  desired  was  a  period  of 
guard-duty  in  the  Pyrenees  during  the  brief  Spanish  war. 
In  1827,  weary  of  piping  peace,  already  a  noted  poet  and 
the  author  of  Cinq- Mars  (1826),  but  grieved  perhaps  that 
others  did  not  surround  him  with  a  halo  quite  so  brilliant  as 
that  with  which  he  glorified  himself,  he  resigned  from  the 
army  and  turned  to  literature,  finding  for  the  moment  his 
closest  affinities  in  Hugo  and  Sainte-Beuve,  though  his 
sensitive  and  passionate  royalism  afterward  estranged  him 
from  both.  He  felt  keenly  the  Revolution  of  1830.  Siello 
(1832)  was  marked  by  deepening  pessimism,  and  in  Military 
Servitude  and  Grandeur  (Servitude  et  grandeur  militaires, 
1835)  he  voiced  with  subdued  sadness  the  tragic  fatality 
of  conflicting  duty  in  the  soldier's  life.  Then  he  wrapped 
himself  in  gloomy  silence,  and  published  no  word  until  his 
death.  Vigny  was  afflicted  with  the  "  world-pain  "  of  his 
generation  in  one  of  its  last  stages.  In  the  beginning  and 
to  the  end  his  fiction  is  the  expression  of  a  dignified  mel- 


Fiction  of  the  Romantic  School      6i 

ancholy.  He  tells  us  that  he  was  "  disenchanted  before  he 
had  tasted  illusion  and  fatigued  with  life  before  he  had 
lived." 

Cinq-Mars  (1826)  is  the  elaboration  of  a  hearty  diet  of 
Walter  Scott  and  Chateaubriand  in  a  mind  strong  but 
reserved  and  coldly  pessimistic,  and  by  an  imagination 
stimulated  through  military  service  in  the  legendary  valley 
of  Roncesvalles.  Its  subject  is  a  triple  tragedy,  the 
tragedy  of  the  dying  Louis  XIII.,  humiliated  by  the  daily 
filching  from  him  of  his  regal  authority,  the  tragedy  of  the 
dying  Richelieu,  clutching  his  power  over  life  even  as  he  is 
passing  to  death,  and  the  tragedy  of  Cinq-Mars,  his  brave, 
magnanimous,  though  criminal  victim.  Scott  had  used 
history  as  a  picturesque  background,  Vigny  thought  he  saw 
in  it  the  possibility  of  a  deeper  revelation  of  human  life. 
To  him,  as  to  Carlyle,  illustrious  men  seemed  symbols  of 
the  universal  mind  of  society.  Thus,  when  he  took  histori- 
cal persons  for  his  characters  he  projected  into  them  his 
own  ideas,  and  so  Cinq-Mars  inevitably  became,  for  all  its 
three  hundred  authorities,  a  falsification  of  history  and  a 
distortion  of  character.  But  though  these  faults  were 
obvious  enough  to  such  critical  historians  as  Thierry, 
Thiers,  and  Guizot,  they  were  less  felt  by  the  public  then 
than  they  would  be  to-day.  The  book  attained  immediate 
and  very  great  success,  partly  because  it  was  the  first 
evocation  of  a  national  past  toward  which  the  reaction  from 
the  Revolution  naturally  impelled  the  romantic  mind,  partly 
also  because  of  its  limpid  style  and  poetic  charm.  But  if 
it  be  judged  by  modern  standards,  Cinq-Mars  must  be 
pronounced  dull,  artificial,  and  false,  without  historic  insight 
or  historic  feeling.  The  plot  lacks  action,  and  the  charac- 
ters  lack    fife.     Its   delicate   descriptions   and   occasional 


62        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

elegiac  beauties  do  not  raise  it  to  the  rank  of  Notre-Dame 
(1830)  or  even  of  The  Three  Guardsmen  (1844).  Yet  it 
is  right  to  remember  that  Vigny  was  first  in  the  field,  and 
that  he  led  where  others  followed. 

Stello  is  a  novel  only  in  the  sense  that  we  give  that  name 
to  James  the  Fatalist  (Jacques  le  fataliste,  1796)  or  to 
Tristram  Shandy.  The  historical  methods  of  Cinq-Mars 
are  here  applied  to  Andr^  Chenier,  and  the  author  seems 
to  have  been  both  surprised  and  hurt  that  that  poet's  rela- 
tives should  prefer  their  truth  to  his  fancy.  The  other 
victims  of  his  idealistic  philosophy  of  history  were  the  long- 
dead  English  poets  Gilbert  and  Chatterton,  who  had  no 
relatives  to  protest  for  them. 

Time,  that  tries  all  things,  will  probably  grant  a  longer  life 
to  the  three  short  stories  that  illustrate  Military  Servitude 
and  Grandeur  than  to  Stello  or  to  Cinq-Mars,  In  Stello 
he  had,  he  says,  lamented  the  condition  of  the  poet  in  our 
society  j  here  he  will  show  that  of  the  soldier  "  another 
modern  pariah,"  for  to  him  as  to  Madame  de  Stael  it  seemed 
that  all  moral  greatness  carried  with  it  a  servitude  to  be  the 
shroud  of  its  happiness.  The  construction  of  the  stories 
may  still  be  faulty,  but  there  is  a  nobility  in  the  fundamen- 
tal conception  that  we  miss  in  Stello  and  Cinq-Mars ;  and 
though  the  poet's  vision  certainly  still  distorts  and  falsifies 
history,  yet,  as  Sainte-Beuve  says,  it  is  rather  by  over- 
anxious thought  than  by  wantonness.  Like  an  alchemist, 
he  is  seeking  to  transform  metals,  to  make  gold  of  clay  and 
diamond  of  carbon.  Vigny  says  he  will  be  content  if  men 
"believe  and  weep,"  but  unfortunately  readers  do  not  weep 
to-day  as  they  did  in  1835,  though  none  can  fail  to  remark 
the  admirable  rhetorical  art  in  the  dialogue  between  Pope 
and  Emperor  in  The  Malacca  Cane  (la  Canne  de  jonc)  ; 


Fiction  of  the  Romantic  School      63 

and  the  noble  conception  of  honour  as  "  the  faith  that  all 
still  share  "  gives  to  the  whole  a  dignity  of  abnegation  and 
resignation  hardly  surpassed  in  modern  fiction. 

All  the  members  of  the  first  Cenacle  attempted  fiction,  even 
Sainte-Beuve,  who  published,  in  1834,  his  sole  novel,  Pleas- 
ure (Volupt^),  as  "  an  indirect  way  of  loving  and  of  saying 
so,"  like  the  youthful  verses  that  had  preceded  it.  Sainte- 
Beuve's  learning  and  broad  sympathies  were  destined  to  make 
him  the  greatest  literary  critic  of  the  world ;  but  his  whole 
life  was,  as  he  says,  only  "  a  long  course  in  moral  physiol- 
ogy," and  Volupte  is  an  effort  of  self-analysis  in  a  man  who 
from  being  an  eager  medical  student  had  become  a  love- 
sick Werther,  had  then  developed  "  a  pronounced  vein  of 
religious  sensibility,"  and  had  at  last  recovered  his  normal 
balance  of  mind.  His  story  is  to  be,  he  tells  us,  "  an  analysis 
of  an  inclination,  passion,  or  perhaps  a  vice,  and  of  all  the 
part  of  the  soul  that  is  dominated  by  that  vice  and  takes  its 
tone  from  it,  that  is,  all  that  is  languid,  idle,  clinging,  secret, 
private,  mysterious,  furtive,  subtly  dreamy,  effeminately 
tender,  in  short,  voluptuous."  His  Amaury  is  himself  in 
the  sense  that  Werther  is  Goethe.  But  while  Sainte-Beuve 
became  a  confirmed  epicurean,  Amaury  "  attributed  to 
himself  a  mystic  illusion  to  colour  and  shade  his  epicu- 
reanism," and  so  finally  turned  priest,  as  Lamartine's  Joce- 
lyn  was  to  do  under  somewhat  similar  circumstances.  The 
novel,  once  much  talked  of,  is  to-day  interesting  chiefly  as 
illustrating  a  phase  of  romantic  morbidity,  and  for  the  light 
that  it  throws  on  the  ethical  and  intellectual  process  by 
which  this  remarkable  mind  came  to  clearness. 

Of  far  higher  rank  is  the  fiction  of  Alfred  de  Musset,  The 
Confession  of  a  Child  of  the  Age  (la  Confession  d'un  enfant 
du  siecle,  1836),  and  the  admirable  short  stories  of  various 


64        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

dates  from  1836  to  1853.      Musset,  like  Hugo  and  Vigny, 
was  greater  as  a  poet  and  as  a  dramatist  than  as  a  novelist, 
yet  we  shall  not  understand  him  as  a  poet  if  we  fail  to  take 
account  of  this    Confession,  the  literary  precipitate  of  his 
love  for  George  Sand  and  of  his  estrangement  from  her. 
The  ghouls  of  criticism  have  recently  stirred  this  malodorous 
affair  with  eager  industry,  but  there  is  no  reason  to  follow 
them   into   the  latiince   of  literature.      It  is  sufficient  to 
know  that  Musset's  naturally  weak  moral  nature  was  in- 
capable of  constant  attachment  to  anybody,  but  he  cared 
for  George  Sand  more  than  he  ever  did  for  any  other,  and 
their  estrangement  was  a  shock  from  which  he  never  re- 
covered.     Musset  was  indeed  "  a  child  all  his  life  and  a 
spoiled  child."     He  was  also  a  showman  of  his  emotions, 
eager  to  exhibit  his  torn  heart  and  to  invite  all  the  world  to 
the  spectacle.     That  is  the  purpose  of  this  rather  morbid 
"  confession,"  which  opens  with  a  discussion  on  the  social 
psychology  of  the  nineteenth  century  by  which  the  author 
seeks  to  make  us  comprehend  and  excuse  that  melancholy 
that  had  befallen  him  as  the  result  of  a  somewhat  vulgar 
and  commonplace  adventure.      One  lays  aside  the  book 
with  a  strange  mingling  of  admiration  and  contempt,  and 
with  the  feeling  that  Musset's  genius  cannot  hide  his  fatal 
weakness.     Like  his  hero.  Octave,  Musset  had  allowed  the 
zeal  of  his  heart  to  consume  him.     For  the  moment  he  had 
lost  all  joy  of  life  and  hope  in  life  for  love  of  George  Sand, 
who  is  Octave's  Brigitte,  even  to  her  clothes.     But  as  the 
wound  scarified  with  time,  at  intervals   during   the   next 
eight    years   he   wrote   ten   lively,    delicate,    graceful,  and 
fascinating  sketches  of  young  love,  to  which   during  the 
rest  of  his  life  he  added  but  one.   The  Beauty-Spot  (la 
Mouche,  185 1 ),  which  has  hardly  more  than  a  pathological 


Fiction  of  the  Romantic  School      65 

interest,  as  of  a  flickering  imagination  blazing  brightly  a 
moment  before  its  final  extinction.  We  may  not  care  for 
the  sentimental  psychology  of  simultaneous  love  in  The 
Two  Mistresses  (les  Deux  maitresses),  but  the  dash  of 
Croisilles  is  as  brilliant  as  its  historic  colouring,  Frederic  and 
Bernerette  is  a  piece  of  exquisite  pathos,  a  unique  blossom 
in  the  literature  of  virginity  of  heart,  Mimi  Pinson  takes  us 
on  a  charming  excursion  to  the  coast  of  Bohemia,  and  The 
White  Blackbird  (le  Merle  blanc)  is  the  high-water  mark 
of  Musset's  melancholy  irony,  a  transparent  allegory,  first 
of  the  nipping  of  his  boyhood's  aspirations,  then  of  the 
blighting  of  his  heart  at  the  vanishing  of  the  ideal  George 
Sand  that  his  fancy  had  conjured  for  his  intoxication.  These 
and  nearly  all  the  other  tales  are  founded  on  observation, 
and  in  a  sense  are  human  documents ;  but  in  his  moments 
of  inspiration  Musset  saw  reality  with  a  poet's  vision  that  is 
all  his  own. 

The  oldest  of  the  romantic  poets  and  the  first  to  make 
his  mark  in  literature  was  the  last  to  write  novels ;  nor  was 
it  by  his  novels  that  Lamartine  exercised  the  greatest  in- 
fluence on  the  development  of  fiction,  but  rather  on  its 
emotional  tone  by  his  Meditations  of  1820,  and  on  its 
technfc  by  his  epic  Jocelyn  of  1828,  while  his  first  and  best 
prose  tales  date  from  1849.  Jocelyn  deals  with  the  loves 
of  the  bewitching  Laurence  for  her  affinity  Jocelyn,  a  can- 
didate for  the  priesthood  and  so  vowed  to  celibacy  before 
he  had  learned  to  know  the  joys  that  he  had  forsaken.  It 
is  thus,  in  all  but  form,  a  psychologic  novel,  and  its  descrip- 
tions of  country  life  unmistakably  affected  the  pastoral 
fiction  of  George  Sand.  Moreover,  it  was  from  Jocelyn  and 
from  personal  experiences  already  treated  in  the  Medita- 
tions that  Lamartine  drew  the  materials  that  he  recast,  late 

S 


66        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

in  life  and  under  stress  of  circumstances,  not  at  all  to  their 
advantage,  into  the  prose  tales  of  Luc)\  Graciella,  and 
Raphael^  which  he  wove  into  his  autobiographical  Con- 
fidences (1849),  to  be  followed  by  a  great  number  of 
novels  and  tales,  made  to  sell  and  not  to  read,  of  which  it 
is  charity  to  be  silent. 

Raphael  and  Graziella,  when  they  are  detached  from 
the  setting  of  fatuous  self-admiration  in  which  they  were 
first  presented,  are  seen  to  be  sentimental  paraphrases  of 
his  verses.  He  had  treated  th^  theme  of  Raphaels  the  first 
Meditations,  and  that  of  Graziella  ten  years  later.  It  is  true 
that  Lamartine  dates  the  prose  Graziella  1829,  but  also  true 
that,  like  Hugo,  he  had  "  the  gift  of  inaccuracy  "  and  tells  us 
in  his  preface  that  he  wrote  it  in  1843.  It  records  an  expe- 
rience of  1 82 1,  as  Raphael  doQS  one  of  18 16,  with  a  curious 
unconsciousness  that  his  part  in  them  could  seem  con- 
temptible, and  that  the  fate,  at  least  of  Graziella,  could  pro- 
voke indignation  as  well  as  pity. 

Raphael  is  the  warmed-over  gruel  of  the  poet's  love  for 
Elvire  as  told  in  The  Lake  (le  Lac),  though  with  inaccu- 
racies of  date  and  otherwise.  Worse  than  this  is  the  drop 
of  sensual  tar  in  the  jar  of  sentimental  honey,  and  worse 
than  all,  the  author's  fatuous  delight  at  the  contemplation 
of  perfections  that  made  his  autobiographic  hero  resemble 
at  once  Raphael,  Canova,  Job,  Tasso,  Shakspere,  Byron, 
Caesar,  Demosthenes,  Cato,  and  some  unnamed  "great 
musician."  In  short,  he  was  "  a  Titan  of  emotion,"  who  re- 
quired a  background  of  lake  and  mountains  against  which 
to  set  off  his  sentiment,  and  who  describes  this  environment 
to  us  with  a  detail  that  he  ingenuously  remarks  he  was  too 
preoccupied  to  notice  at  the  time,  so  that  it  is  plainly 
both  superfluous  and   impertinent.      Lamartine  does   not 


Fiction  of  the  Romantic  School      67 


make  his  landscape  illustrate  emotion,  and  the  story  is  psy- 
chologically unsatisfactory.  To  know  the  truth  about  this 
poet's  young  love  would  aid  greatly  in  understanding  his 
genius,  but  Raphael  is  meant  to  mislead  rather  than  to 
guide  us. 

Graziella  transports  us  to  a  fisher's  hut  on  a  little  island 
near  Naples,  where  the  author  is  cast  ashore  and  passes  the 
winter  evenings  in  innoculating  the  weeping  family  with  the 
sentimental  virus  of  Paul  and  Virginia.  There  are  those 
to  whom  the  story  seems  instinct  with  gentle  purity.  There 
are  others  to  whom  this  narrative  of  a  deliberate  seduction 
by  sentiment,  ending,  after  the  fashion  of  Atala^  in  the  death 
of  the  heroine,  seems  a  sickly  aftermath  of  that  intermin- 
gling of  sentimentality  and  cerebral  voluptuousness  in  which 
the  eighteenth  century  produced  so  many  masters.  The 
ethical  tone  of  Lamartine's  tales  was  already  in  Bernardin, 
and  one  is  not  surprised  to  learn  that  this  was  his  favourite 
author. 

Both  these  tales  were  praised  for  their  poetic  grace  and 
melody,  and  to  a  sober  taste  they  seem  surcharged  with 
both.  But  for  a  time  some  thought  them  destined  to 
renew  among  the  youth  of  1850  the  effect  produced  on 
the  generation  of  1820  by  the  Meditations.  Times  had 
changed,  however.  The  weary  idealism  of  1820  was  yield- 
ing to  an  eager  materialism  that  was  determined  to  possess 
the  good  things  of  this  world  and  to  enjoy  them,  a  temper 
that  soon  translated  itself  into  that  social  corruption  and  lit- 
erary frivolity  which  provoked  the  satire  of  the  naturalistic 
school.  Thus  in  the  development  of  the  fiction  of  the  Second 
Empire  Lamartine,  like  the  elder  Hugo,  changed  nothing 
and  checked  nothing.  Their  novels  never  outgrew  the  youth 
of  their  authors,  and  were  old  even  when  they  were  new. 


CHAPTER  IV 

ALEXANDRE  DUMAS  AND   THE   NAPOLEONIC   GENERATION 

BESIDES  the  literary  artists  and  poets  who  in  various 
directions  enlarged  the  borders  of  the  romantic 
novel  there  was  a  considerable  group  of  men  to  whom 
fiction  was  less  an  art  than  a  trade,  while  others,  having 
achieved  a  passing  success,  either  suffered  eclipse  or  turned 
their  talent  elsewhere.  They  were  often  men  of  genius ; 
some  attained  a  popularity  unapproached  by  any  of  the 
writers  whom  we  have  as  yet  studied ;  and  one  of  them  is 
still  probably  the  most  universally  read  story-teller  of  the 
world,  though  by  no  means  among  the  great  artists  of 
fiction. 

Many  of  the  faults  that  the  author  of  Monte  Crista 
shares  with  those  of  The  Wandering  Jew  and  of  The  Me- 
moirs of  the  Devil  BXQ  due  to  the  invention  o{  Xht  feuiileton, 
which  was  first  introduced,  possibly  by  Sue,  in  the  early  thir- 
ties, and  has  become  an  indispensable  part  of  every  French 
journal.  This  is  not  the  place  to  inquire  the  reasons  that 
make  Frenchmen  desire  daily  fragments  of  novels,  but  that 
they  do  desire  them  is  certain,  and  the  effect  of  that  desire 
on  minor  novelists  and  even  on  the  greater  caterers  to  the 
public  was  obvious  from  the  first.  Where  each  day  de- 
mands its  "  copy  "  hasty  production  becomes  the  rule,  and 
when  each  fragment  must  have  independent  interest  and 
artistic  effect  the  whole  suffers  from  the  accentuation  of  the 
parts,  the  attention  of  the  reader  is  concentrated  perforce 


Dumas  and  the  Napoleonic  Generation  69 

on  details,  and  this  can  but  influence  the  author  in  the  con- 
duct of  his  story.  In  search  of  a  market  for  his  work  he 
becomes  a  sort  of  novehstic  restaurateur,  serving  Uterary 
meals  daily  to  order  and  spicing  each  dish  to  suit  the 
palate  of  his  customer. 

The  passion  for  the  feuilleion  culminated  in  the  forties, 
when,  as  Jules  Janin  said,  "  France  was  overwhelmed  by 
some  five  or  six  huge  compositions  that  embraced  in  their 
sombre  frame-work,  earth,  heaven,  and  hell,  with  all  the 
most  deadly  passions  of  the  human  race."  It  seemed  as 
though  general  satiety  had  challenged  the  spirit,  wit,  and  in- 
vention of  the  best  story-tellers  of  the  time  to  rival  one 
another  in  unwholesome  studies,  each  of  which  effaced  the 
transitory  impression  of  the  foregoing.  The  amount  pro- 
duced was  immense.  Dumas  alone  boasts  to  have  issued 
under  his  name  twelve  hundred  volumes.  Kock,  Sue, 
Souli^  and  others  show  lists  of  portentous  length.  But 
what  was  once  easy  writing  now  makes  exceedingly  hard 
reading.  The  most  conscientious  historian  of  literature  will 
not  subject  himself  to  the  futile  labor  of  reading  the  com- 
plete works  of  Souvestre  or  of  Karr,  of  Janin  or  Bernard,  or 
even  of  Sue  and  Dumas.  It  is  enough  if  he  have  read  suf- 
ficiently to  catch  the  tone  and  spirit  of  these  authors,  and 
if  he  be  able  to  direct  the  reader  to  the  more  characteristic 
products  of  their  genius. 

Unquestioned  king  among  the  feuilletonists  of  this  gen- 
eration, "  the  greatest  inventor  of  stories  in  the  Western 
world,"  the  most  universal  in  his  interests  and  sympathies, 
was  Alexandre  Dumas,  father  of  the  noted  dramatist,  and 
son  of  a  gallant  general  of  Napoleon  who  served  with  dis- 
tinction in  the  Tyrol  and  in  Egypt,  but  died  in  neglect  in 
1806.     His  grandfather  was  the  Marquis  de  la  Pailleterie, 


70        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

but  his  father's  legitimacy  is  not  altogether  clear,  for  Dumas 
was  the  name  of  a  full  blooded  Domingo  negress  whom  the 
marquis  is  said  to  have  married  in  1760.  General  Dumas 
was  therefore  a  mulatto,  who  returned  to  France  from  the 
West  Indies  about  1780,  and  when  his  aged  father  persisted 
in  a  foolish  marriage  with  a  woman  from  the  servants'  hall, 
enlisted  in  the  Queen's  Guards  under  the  name  of  his 
mother,  Dumas. 

Many  wonderful  tales  are  told  of  this  man's  courage,  im- 
petuosity, and  physical  strength.  He  married  in  1792  an 
innkeeper's  daughter  at  Villers-Cotterets,  became  a  gen- 
eral in  1793,  provoked  the  jealousy  of  Napoleon,  was  re- 
tired in  1 80 1,  and  returned  home  to  close  his  adventurous 
life  with  five  years  of  restless  inaction.  It  was  under  these 
exceptional  conditions  that  his  son  Alexandre  was  born, 
July  24,  1802.  The  child  inherited  much  of  the  negress- 
grand mother's  appearance  and  nature,  but  also  much  of  the 
aristocratic  spirit  of  his  marquis  grandfather,  a  contrast  and 
combination  that  one  notes  constantly  in  his  novels. 

Dumas's  boyhood  was  passed  at  Villers-Cotterets.  His 
first  impressions  were  of  his  soldierly  father,  and  then  of  war 
and  of  the  Cossack  invasion  after  Leipzig.  He  has  painted 
his  awkward  boyhood  and  calf-love  both  in  his  Memoiis 
and  in  Ange  Fitou.  There  was  talk  for  a  time  of  educa- 
ting him  for  the  Church;  but  in  181 9  he  received  a  strong 
literary  impulse  from  a  performance  of  Ducis's  version  of 
Hamlet  at  Soissons,  where  he  had  been  apprenticed  to  a 
notary.  Instantly  he  set  about  writing  a  play  and  schemed 
a  visit  to  Paris,  which  he  reached  at  last  in  1823  with 
twenty  francs  and  hope  for  all  his  patrimony. 

In  Paris  he  presently  found  a  livelihood  in  the  household 
of  the  future  king,  Louis   Philippe,  and  in  the  next  year 


Dumas  and  the  Napoleonic  Generation  71 

his  son  Alexandre  was  born,  though  he  had  no  regular 
domestic  Hfe  till  fortune  had  ceased  to  smile  on  him.  To 
a  young  author  the  drama  then  offered  the  best  opportunity, 
so  to  this  he  devoted  himself  almost  exclusively,  and  was 
first  to  ring  the  tocsin  of  romantic  revolt  on  the  stage  with 
his  Henry  III,  in  1829.  His  dramas  brought  him  noto- 
riety and  wealth,  which  he  spent  as  soon  as  won  and  often 
before.  He  was  in  the  fore-front  of  the  Revolution  of 
1830,  but  was  too  ebullient  a  republican  to  find  favour  with 
the  Orleanists.  He  resigned  his  post  in  the  royal  house- 
hold, and  presently  began  to  contribute  to  the  since  famous 
Revue  des  deux  mondes  the  first  of  his  historical  novels,  Isa- 
belle  of  Bavaria,  Here  his  theme  is  the  years  that  preceded 
the  coming  of  the  Maid  of  Orleans,  and  were  to  degrade 
the  French  crown  to  the  point  where  it  should  owe  its 
survival  to  a  shepherd  girl.  But  even  in  such  a  crisis  of 
history  Dumas  does  not  base  his  story  on  any  careful  study 
of  anything,  but  on  hasty  impressions  of  the  memoirs  of 
the  time,  decked  out  by  his  exuberant  imagination  into 
scenes  that  he  hoped  might  resemble  those  of  Scott ;  and 
presently  there  arose  in  his  mind  a  scheme  for  turning  the 
whole  history  of  France  to  similar  account  in  a  sort  of 
Comedy  of  History  that  should  be  neither  romance  nor 
history,  but  something  between  the  two,  history  for  those 
who  could  or  would  read  only  romance,  and  romance  for 
those  who  liked,  as  he  said,  "  to  exalt  history  to  the  height 
of  fiction,"  and  let  their  fancy  play  around  the  evidences 
of  the  past. 

These  historical  novels,  published  under  the  collective 
title  of  Chronicles  of  France,  are  decidedly  the  best  work 
of  this  prince  of  improvisatores.  They  have  no  grasp  of 
character  and   no   psychological    insight,   but  they   show 


72        A   Century  of  French  Fiction 

a  prodigious  imagination,  and  a  wonderful  dramatic  instinct 
that  fused  and  recast  all  materials  that  fell  into  the  furnace 
of  his  imagination.  He  is  a  true  Jongleur,  linking  together 
by  the  slenderest  thread  of  narrative  chaplets  of  episodes 
that  are  by  turns  frolicsome  and  wild,  extravagant,  breath- 
less, and  impetuous.  They  are  "  chronicles "  rather  than 
novels,  and  consist,  as  such  primitive  writing  is  apt  to  do, 
largely  of  dialogue.  In  them  all  women  are  subordinated 
to  men,  character  to  plot,  and  everything  to  action.  Milady, 
his  best  female  character,  is  so  because  she  is  most  virile. 
He  skims  the  surface  of  history  like  a  light-hearted  boy 
to  the  last,  yet  with  a  power  of  story-telhng  that  never 
fails  to  absorb  the  reader  and  excite  an  intense  curiosity. 

Arranged  in  their  historical  order  these  "chronicles" 
begin  with  The  Bastard  of  Mauleon  and  Duguesclin,  pass 
in  Isabelle  of  Bavaria  to  the  days  of  Joan  of  Arc,  and 
thence  in  Queen  Margot  to  the  St.  Bartholomew.  From 
that  point  they  succeed  one  another  with  comparatively 
br4ef  intervals  through  the  closing  years  of  the  Valois  in 
The  Lady  of  Monsoreau,  and  the  early  days  of  the  Bourbons 
in  The  Forty-Five,  to  Louis  XHI.  in  The  Three  Guards- 
men, and  the  days  of  Mazarin  in  Twenty  Years  After,  while 
The  Viscount  of  Bragelonne  brings  us  to  the  early  reign  of 
Louis  XIV.  The  setting  of  that  royal  sun  occupies  The 
Chevalier  of  Hat-mental,  and  A  Daughter  of  the  Regent 
brings  us  to  the  disintegration  of  society  under  the  child- 
king  I^uis  XV.,  a  subject  pursued  in  Joseph  Balsamo, 
Then  The  Queen's  Necklace  shows  us  the  prosperous  days 
of  Marie  Antoinette,  while  in  Ange  Pitou  and  The  Countess 
of  Charny  we  are  carried  on  to  the  Revolution,  with  varied 
aspects  of  which  Dumas  deals  in  A  Chevalier  of  the  Maison- 
Rouge,  The  Whites  and  the  Blues,  The  Companions  of  Jehu, 


Dumas  and  the  Napoleonic  Generation  73 

and  The  Red  Rose,  that  closes  the  series  of  well-nigh  an 
hundred  volumes. 

In  his  Memoirs  Dumas  tells  us  that  about  the  time  when 
he  first  achieved  success  as  a  novelist  he  was  trying  to  pose 
as  a  gloomy  Ren^,  but  suddenly  discovered  that  he  had  an 
irrepressible  gaiety  of  style,  so  that  his  brightest  fancies 
were  stimulated  by  the  hardest  labor  and  came  on  his 
dreariest  days,  —  a  fact  testified  to  by  his  Impressions  of 
a  journey  undertaken  in  1832  chiefly  because  his  methods 
of  adaptation  and  annexation  of  the  works  of  others  had 
made  his  absence  from  Paris  for  a  time  desirable. 

These  Impressions  belong  in  good  part  to  fiction ;  they 
are  filled  with  anecdote,  and  they  have  an  instinct  for  the 
romance  of  history,  seizing  instantly  on  the  effective  legends 
of  each  locality  and  decking  them  out  with  a  picturesque 
humour  that  is  rarely  strained  or  excessive,  though  the 
volumes  are  outrageously  padded  and  betray  a  rudimentary 
and  perhaps  racial  notion  of  literary  honesty. 

On  Dumas's  plagiarism  volumes  have  been  written,  and 
something  must  be  said  of  it  in  any  account  of  him.  He 
was  accused  of  keeping  a  "  novel  factory,"  of  buying  the 
work  of  unknown  authors  or  translators  and  selling  it  to 
publishers  under  his  own  name,  though  in  some  cases  he 
had  not  so  much  as  read  what  he  signed.  In  Qu^rard's 
Literary  Cheats  Unveiled  (les  Supercheries  litt^raires,  1859) 
the  literary  iniquities  of  Dumas  are  pursued  through  the 
bulk  of  an  ordinary-sized  volume,  though  with  an  envious 
injustice  that  defeats  its  own  purpose.  The  truth  seems  to 
be  that  Dumas  was  always  willing  to  buy  ideas,  and  if  he 
used  these  in  novels  or  plays  he  regarded  himself  as  their 
sole  author.  More  than  this,  he  was  willing  to  buy  novels 
and  plays  written  out,  and  when  he  had  rewritten  them 


74        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

he  also  claimed  their  authorship  because  of  the  new  spirit 
and  matter  that  he  had  infused  into  them.  Thus  he  bought 
sixty  pages  on  The  Chevalier  of  Har mental  zxA  made  from 
them  four  volumes.  But  more  even  than  this,  he  was 
willing  to  supply  the  ideas  and  let  others  do  the  journey- 
man-work of  composition.  Later  he  became  even  less 
scrupulous,  but  his  multitudinous  volumes  published  during 
the  forties,  including  nearly  all  now  read,  would  fall  in  one 
or  another  of  the  categories  above,  and  might  be  claimed 
as  in  some  sense  his  own.  Certain  it  is  that  none  of 
those  who  claimed  to  share  his  honour  as  well  as  his  profits 
were  able  to  produce  anything  like  them,  and  we  know 
that  Dumas  was  as  facile  a  composer  as  he  was  an  in- 
dustrious penman.  "  He  lived,"  says  Jules  Janin,  "  with- 
out a  moment's  rest.  Even  while  travelling  he  wrote, 
composed,  planned.  .  .  .  He  was  a  slave  of  story-telling. 
His  youth,  his  whole  life,  passed  in  obeying  this  task- 
master—  the  ogre  that  swallowed  up  his  genius."  There 
was  no  period  of  his  life  when  he  was  incapable  of  intense 
application  and  rapid  production.  If  he  employed  assis- 
tants, at  least  he  got  far  more  out  of  them  than  they  could 
get  out  of  themselves.  He  gave  more  than  he  received. 
"  Gentlemen,"  he  could  proudly  respond  to  his  detractors, 
"  the  doors  are  open  for  you,  the  columns  are  ready.  .  .  . 
Write  us  a  Three  Guardsmen^  a  Monte  Cristo.  Don't 
wait  till  I  am  dead  to  do  it.  With  all  the  books  I  have 
to  write,  give  me  the  relaxation  of  reading  yours." 

The  vanity  that  Dumas  had  as  an  inheritance  from 
his  negro  grandmother  no  doubt  made  him  over-confident 
in  this  squandering  of  his  reputation,  powerfully  stimulated 
as  it  was  by  the  urgent  demands  of  the  Parisian  press.  Six 
newspapers  at   once   besought  him  for  stories   after   The 


Dumas  and  the  Napoleonic  Generation  y^ 

Chevalier  of  Harmental  hz.6.  won  him  fame  in  1843,  and 
it  was  precisely  in  the  three  following  years  that  he  pro- 
duced his  best  work,  Monte  Crisfo,  The  Three  Guardsmen, 
Twenty  Years  After,  and  Queen  Margot,  work  that  he  never 
equalled,  and  approached  only  in  the  next  four  years  with 
The  Mefnoirs  of  a  Physician,  The  Forty-Five,  The  Viscount 
of  Bragelonne,  and  The  Black  Tulip,  and  later  never,  save 
perhaps  in  the  last  flash  of  his  genius,  The  Whites  and  the 
Blues,  of  1868. 

In  one  way  or  another,  by  plan,  spirit,  or  creative  breath, 
Dumas  was  inspirer,  adapter,  author,  or  sponsor  of  some 
1200  volumes,  which  in  their  present  more  closely  printed 
form  still  number  298.  The  taste  of  the  time  was  for  long 
novels  in  daily  morsels,  where,  as  Gautier  said,  "  people 
found  the  characters  so  regularly  and  so  long  every  morn- 
ing at  their  bedside  that  they  came  to  regard  them  as 
a  part  of  daily  life.  ...  I  used  often  to  hear  men  say : 
*  Monte  Cristo  has  done  this  or  that ;  I  think  he  was  right,* 
or  possibly  wrong,  just  as  one  would  praise  or  blame  the 
acts  of  one  alive."  Thackeray,  in  a  playful  letter  to  Dumas, 
alludes  to  this  advantage  of  length  :  "  I  like  your  romances 
in  twenty-one  volumes.  ...  I  have  not  skipped  a  word 
of  Monte  Cristo,  and  it  made  me  quite  happy  when,  having 
read  eight  volumes  of  the  Three  Musqueteers  {i.  e.  The  Three 
Guardsmen),  I  saw  Mr.  Roland  bring  me  ten  more  under  the 
tide  Twenty  Years  After,  May  you  make  Athos,  Porthos, 
and  Aramis  live  an  hundred  years  and  treat  us  to  twelve 
volumes  more  of  their  adventures.  May  the  Physician 
whose  Memoirs  you  have  in  hand,  beginning  them  at  the 
commencement  of  the  reign  of  Louis  XV.,  make  the  for- 
tune of  the  apothecaries  of  the  revolution  of  July  by  his 
prescriptions.'* 


76        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

But  \i  m  fetiilletons  the  novels  gained  by  length  they  lose 
by  it  when  read  in  volumes,  for  here  their  lack  of  structure 
and  proportion  is  more  obvious,  and  the  **  spinning  of  copy  " 
is  seen  to  be  at  times  mere  charlatanry.  It  is  the  simple 
truth  to  say  that  Dumas  was  always  willing  to  sacrifice  art 
to  money.  He  made  no  secret  of  it.  He  was  ready  to 
contract  for  the  future  delivery  of  his  imagination  at  fixed 
date  in  quantities  to  suit  all  purchasers.  The  childlike 
frankness  of  his  shamelessness  is  almost  amusing.  Pleading 
in  one  of  his  innumerable  lawsuits  he  said  in  1847  • 
"There  are  forty  Academicians.  Let  them  contract  to 
supply  you  with  eighty  volumes  a  year.  They  will  bank- 
rupt you.  Alone  I  have  done  what  never  man  did  before 
nor  ever  will  again."  Or  consider  this  little  scene  :  "  Mr. 
Veron  came  to  me  and  said :  We  are  ruined  if  we  do  not 
publish  in  eight  days  an  amusing,  sparkling,  interesting 
romance."  "  You  want  one  volume,"  I  said ;  "  that  will 
be  six  thousand  lines,  thirty-five  sheets  of  my  handwriting. 
Take  this  pile  of  paper.  Number  and  head  the  pages." 
And  the  work  was  done. 

As  to  the  quality  of  such  work,  Dumas  did  not  for  a 
moment  deceive  himself.  Toward  the  close  of  his  life  he 
wrote  to  the  Emperor  (1864)  :  "There  were  in  1830,  and 
there  are  still,  three  men  at  the  head  of  French  literature, 
Hugo,  Lamartine,  and  Myself.  Hugo  is  proscribed,  Lamar- 
tine  ruined.  .  .  .  The  censorship  is  against  me.  I  know 
not  why.  I  have  written  and  published  twelve  hundred 
volumes.  It  is  not  for  me  to  appreciate  them  as  literature. 
Translated  into  all  languages  they  have  been  as  far  as  steam 
could  carry  them.  Though  the  least  worthy,  these  volumes 
have  made  me  in  five  continents  the  most  read  of  the  three, 
perhaps    because  ...  I    am   only   a  vulgariser."      Thus 


Dumas  and  the  Napoleonic  Generation   "jj 

Dumas  is  a  quantity  rather  than  a  quality  with  which  we 
have  to  reckon,  not  an  artist  but  an  entertainer,  a  nation's 
Scheherazade,  who  greatly  extended  the  domain  of  French 
fiction  and  contributed  more  than  any  other  to  give  it  a 
cosmopolitan  audience  in  the  great  middle  class. 

His  popularity  brought  him  enormous  returns,  but  he  was 
a  phenomenon  of  thriftlessness  and  was  preyed  upon  in 
ways  that  seem  almost  incredible,  for,  as  his  son  says,  he 
had  the  generosity  that  made  him  a  millionnaire  to  others 
and  a  beggar  to  himself.  He  became  involved  in  lawsuits, 
as  costly  as  they  were  dishonourable,  in  regard  to  contracts 
that  he  had  signed  with  thoughtless  levity.  His  palace, 
Monte  Cristo,  built  at  a  cost  of  half  a  million  francs  in  the 
heyday  of  his  prosperity  (1847),  was  sold  in  185 1,  and  he 
himself  was  constrained  to  seek  refuge  in  Brussels  from 
his  creditors.  From  that  year  till  his  death  he  became  a 
pathetic  wanderer  in  search  of  peace  and  *'  copy,"  visiting 
England  in  1857,  Russia  and  the  Caucasus  in  1858,  Italy 
in  i860,  and  again  in  1866.  Then  came  four  years  of 
senihty  and  precarious  poverty.  He  was  saved  from  a 
sordid  end  only  by  the  persistent  solicitude  of  the  son 
whose  boyhood  he  had  neglected  and  whose  youth  he  had 
misguided,  but  who  took  him  rather  as  a  warning  than  as 
an  example,  and,  with  a  genius  more  steady  though  less 
brilliant,  came  to  be  the  representative  of  uncompromising 
morals  and  unbending  probity. 

He  died  in  a  country  house  near  Dieppe,  whither  he  had 
been  taken  from  the  excitements  and  dangers  of  Paris  in 
war  time,  on  the  very  day  of  the  Prussian  occupation 
(Dec.  5th,  1870).  He  was  solemnly  interred  in  April, 
1872,  at  his  old  boyhood's  home  in  Villers-Cotterets. 

Into  a  detailed  examination  of  his  novels  it  is  impossible 


78        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

and  unnecessary  to  enter.  Monte  Crista  (1844-5)  ^^^ 
The  Three  Guardsmen  (les  Trois  mousquetaires,  1844) 
typify  what  is  best  in  all.  Here  the  first  impression  is  of 
ease  and  fluency.  His  work  seems,  as  Michelet  said,  to 
move  like  a  natural  force ;  he  has  an  easy  and  seemingly 
unnecessary  fecundity ;  he  creates  needless  characters  and 
squanders  in  a  chapter  incidents  that  might  suffice  for  a 
volume.  Ideas  come  to  him  as  readily  as  words.  The 
reader  soon  feels  sure  that  the  author's  imagination  will 
never  leave  him  in  the  lurch,  and  then  first  begins  to  note 
what  movement  he  gives  to  his  story,  how  lightly  he  touches 
and  passes,  what  an  instinct  he  has  for  the  telling  situations 
that  will  mask  his  shallow  handling  of  character,  for  which 
indeed  the  mass  of  his  readers  cared  and  care  but  little. 

The  Three  Guardsmeny  that  *'  Iliad  of  the  feuilleton"  is 
based  on  the  Memoirs  of  Artagnan^  written  by  Courtils  de 
Sandras  early  in  the  eighteenth  century,  and  in  themselves 
by  no  means  dull  reading.  But  though  Artagnan  is  the 
thread  of  connection,  he  is  no  more  the  centre  of  action 
than  Achilles  is  of  the  Iliad.  That  centre,  as  the  new  title 
suggests,  is  the  triple-linked  devotion  of  the  Three.  "  Of 
your  heroic  heroes,"  says  Thackeray,  "I  think  our  friend 
Monseigneur  Athos,  Count  de  la  F^re,  is  my  favourite.  I 
have  read  about  him  from  sunrise  to  sunset  with  infinite 
contentment  of  mind.  He  has  passed  through  how  many 
volumes?  Forty?  Fifty?  I  wish  for  my  part  there  were 
an  hundred  more,  and  would  never  tire  of  his  rescuing 
prisoners,  punishing  ruffians,  and  running  scoundrels  through 
the  midriff  with  his  most  graceful  rapier.  Ah,  Athos,  Por- 
thos,  and  Aramis,  you  are  a  magnificent  trio."  What  mat- 
ters it  that  the  best  scene.  Milady  tempting  her  guards  to 
treason,  is  adapted  almost  bodily  from  The  Tower  of  Nesle 


Dumas  and  the  Napoleonic  Generation  79 

(le  Tour  de  Nesle,  1832)?  We  feel  it  was  worth  the 
repetition,  and  the  whole  story  is  so  full  of  rush  and  excite- 
ment as  quite  to  disarm  sober  criticism. 

History  as  we  see  it  here  is  a  phantasmagoria  of  facts 
romantically  discomposed  and  distorted,  yet  we  feel  that 
this  man,  so  full  of  verve,  brio,  and  genius,  beUeved  in 
himself  and  in  his  work,  over  which  friends  say  he  showed 
at  times  an  almost  pathetic  enthusiasm.  Two  years  before 
his  death  his  son  found  him  reading  The  Three  Guardsmen, 
"It  is  good,"  said  the  old  man,  with  feeling.  ^^ Monte 
Crista  is  not  up  to  the  Guardsjnen."  And  in  spite  of  our- 
selves we  share  his  enthusiasm.  His  situations  are  improb- 
able if  not  impossible,  but  he  never  gives  us  time  to  realise 
it.  We  are  hurried  from  one  hair-breadth  'scape  to  an- 
other. Wanton  feats  of  daring,  chivalrous  fellowships, 
bold  tricks,  jolly  pranks  bubble  through  the  whole,  set  off 
against  the  sinister  background  of  Milady's  plots  till  she  is 
done  to  death  with  healthy  thoroughness  by  the  great 
Three.  The  morality  may  not  be  elevated,  but  it  is  sound, 
hale,  and  hearty.  There  are  touches  of  a  finer  nobility  in 
Twenty  Years  After,  and  the  stealthy  step  of  age  introduces 
a  vein  of  pathos  into  The  Viscount  of  Bragelonne,  where  the 
dying  Artagnan  says  "Au  revoir  "  to  Athos  and  Porthos, 
and  to  Aramis  "  Good-bye  for  ever."  And  yet  for  all  that 
they  cannot  match  The  Three  Guardsmen. 

Monte  Cristo,  like  the  story  of  Artagnan,  was  founded  on 
an  earlier  novel,  Penchet's  A  Diamond  and  a  Vengeance,  in 
itself,  as  Dumas  said,  "  an  idiotic  tale,'*  whose  possibilities 
he  elaborated  with  the  aid  of  Maquet,  one  of  his  novelistic 
journeymen.  The  island  of  Monte  Cristo  was  a  real  one 
that  he  had  examined  in  1841  when  cruising  as  the  guest 
of  Jerome  Bonaparte.     The  hand  of  Maquet  lies  heavy  on 


8o        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

the  opening  chapters  of  Monte  Cristo,  but  the  spirit  of 
Dumas  enters  with  Dantes  into  the  prison  of  the  Chateau 
d'lf,  and  from  that  moment  the  whole  pulses  brisk  with 
excitement,  dramatic  situation,  chivalry,  gallantry,  and  wit. 
He  gives  free  rein  to  his  imagination  to  picture  an  orgy  of 
wealth,  as  though  to  outbid  Sue  and  Souli^  at  their  own 
game.  He  conceives  a  society  in  which  gold  shall  be  the 
universal  factor,  only  to  drive  his  hero  to  the  conclusion 
that  matter  is  unconquerable,  so  that  Monte  Cristo  is  fain 
to  take  refuge  in  hashish,  as  Sue's  hero  does  in  opium, 
from  the  weariness  of  satiety.  Thus  Monte  Cristo  has  a 
less  tonic  moral  than  The  Three  Guardsmen,  and  the  cen* 
tral  figure  is  not  psychologically  consistent.  A  Dantes 
could  never  have  become  such  a  man  as  the  Count,  who 
forfeits  the  sympathy  he  had  won  when  he  pushes  a  right- 
eous vengeance  beyond  the  verge  of  spiteful  cruelty.  Our 
first  wish,  as  some  one  has  said,  is  that  the  last  five  volumes 
had  been  condensed  to  two ;  our  afterthought  a  regret  that 
they  were  written  at  all. 

When  Dumas  began  to  write  fiction  the  historical  novel 
was  budding  with  brilliant  promise  at  the  hands  of  Vigny, 
M^rim^e,  and  Hugo,  under  the  inspiration  of  Walter  Scott. 
Dumas  blighted  it,  for  it  is  a  genre  that  cannot  bear  vul- 
garisation. That  was  the  extent  of  his  contribution  to  the 
development  of  fiction  as  an  art.  But  his  success  in  the 
trade  of  novel-writing  evoked  a  cloud  of  imitators  who  have 
strutted  and  fretted  for  brief  hours  of  popular  applause,  and 
passed  away  forever  to  the  limbo  of  the  back  shelves  of  the 
provincial  circulating  libraries. 

The  best  of  these  was  surely  Marie  Joseph  (Eugene) 
Sue,  a  man  of  great  though  ill-balanced  genius,  and  second 
only  to   Dumas   among   the   heroes   of  the  feuilleton  in 


Dumas  and  the  Napoleonic  Generation  8i 

rapidity  of  production,  fertility  of  imagination,  and  prodigal 
carelessness  of  execution.  In  1831  he  had  launched  on 
the  crest  of  the  romantic  wave  Aiar^  Gully  a  novel  of 
the  sea,  a  subject  little  cultivated  in  France  since  Gomber- 
ville.  For  this  he  had  gathered  his  inspiration,  and  the 
then  indispensable  "local  colour"  on  a  three  years'  naval 
cruise.  He  had  a  gift  of  story-telling,  a  vivid  and  popular 
style,  but  from  the  first  he  wrote  in  a  sort  of  romantic 
vertigo,  recklessly  mingling  tragic  and  comic,  the  pathetic 
and  the  grotesque,  with  an  inexhaustible  fund  of  gaiety  and 
rapidly  growing  power  of  picturesque  description. 

About  1835  Sue,  who  had  been  hailed  as  the  French 
Cooper,  had  his  head  so  turned  by  aristocratic  adula- 
tion that  he  caught  the  infection  that  came  from  contact 
with  Chateaubriand.  In  Cecile  (1835)  he  shows  the  first 
symptoms  of  the  sickness  of  the  age,  and  he  passed  the 
next  five  years  in  an  intermittent  fever  of  snobbery,  that 
reached  its  crisis  in  The  Marquis  of  Letorieres  (1839). 
This  was  followed  by  a  violent  democratic  reaction,  due  in 
part  to  his  disgust  at  his  equivocal  position  in  a  society  that 
patronised  him,  in  part  to  his  debts,  in  part  to  the  socialistic 
propagandism  of  Proudhon  and  Fourier. 

He  turned  his  conversion  to  good  commercial  account, 
and  it  is  the  work  of  this  period  alone  that  survives.  His 
long  socialistic  novels  in  the  cheap  newspapers  won  such 
hold  on  the  masses  that  the  government  actually  sought  to 
check  or  control  his  activity.  As  a  critic  of  the  day  said, 
he  was  entering  on  an  unexplored  path,  he  was  undertaking 
to  paint  the  sufferings  and  needs  of  the  working  classes 
with  the  intent  of  influencing  them  politically.  "  M.  Sue 
has  been  called  the  novelist  of  the  sea.  To-day  he  has 
named  himself  the  novelist  of  the  people."     Thus  he  gave 

6 


82        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

the  novel  an  audience  and  an  interest  that  it  had  never  yet 
had  in  its  history. 

His  enthusiasm  in  his  new  task  was  indefatigable,  and  in 
The  Mysteries  of  Paris  (les  Mysteres  de  Paris,  1842),  he 
has  created  popular  types,  Fleur  de  Marie,  Le  Chourineur, 
the  Schoolmaster,  La  Louve,  and  the  rest,  that  still  have 
power  to  horrify  or  to  cliarm,  though  perhaps  none  of  them 
have  the  uncanny  fascination  of  Rodin,  the  dirty,  shrewd, 
relentless,  chaste,  and  diabolical  Jesuit  of  The  Wandering 
Jew  (le  Juif  errant,  1844-5).  It  is  curious  to  note,  how- 
ever, that,  throughout,  Sue's  humanitarianism  is  paradoxi- 
cally associated  with  a  sort  of  cynical  hedonism,  as  we  see 
at  the  close  of  The  Wandering  Jew,  and  with  a  belief  in  the 
saving  power  of  the  five-franc-piece  as  strong  as  that  of 
Balzac ;  and  it  is  probable  that  this  reacted  on  the  novels 
of  Dumas,  especially  on  Monte  Cristo. 

In  one  regard,  and  in  one  only.  Sue  is  Dumas's  superior. 
He  has  greater  command  of  the  resources  of  terror.  As 
careless  in  style,  as  melodramatic  in  situations,  as  prolix  as 
Dumas,  he  is,  at  least  in  later  novels,  more  earnest,  but  he  is 
far  inferior  to  Dumas  in  variety  of  interest,  in  vivacity  of 
dialogue,  and  in  geniality  of  conception.  Together  Diimas 
and  Sue  made  XhQfeuitleton  an  integral  part  of  the  French 
newspaper ;  but  before  we  trace  its  further  fortunes  we  may 
remark  in  passing  that  the  socialistic  novel,  inaugurated  by 
Sue  and  glorified  by  Hugo  in  Les  Miserables,  had  violent 
hands  laid  on  it  by  F^lix  Pyat,  and  is  now  barely  convales- 
cent under  the  gentle  nursing  of  L^on  Cladel,  while  the 
satirical  aspects  of  the  agitation  that  culminated  in  1848 
found  voice  in  Reybaud's  two  novels,  Jerome  Paiurel  in 
Search  of  a  Social  Position  (1843)  and  Jerd?ne  Paturel  in 
Search  of  the  Best  Republic  (1848).     These  stories,  now 


Dumas  and  the  Napoleonic  Generation   83 

almost  forgotten,  are  among  the  most  interesting  efforts  of 
our  century  to  turn  the  novel  to  political  account,  and  sug- 
gest in  many  ways  the  Tales  of  Voltaire. 

The  oldest  of  the  group  of  writers  who  without  high  lit- 
erary ideals  or  care  for  literary  art  aided  Dumas  and  Sue  in 
popularizing  the  novel  was  Paul  de  Kock,  whose  name,  like 
that  of  Pigault  Lebrun,  an  earlier  successor  of  Restif  de  la 
Bretonne,  carries  with  it  a  suggestion  of  frivolity  but  also  a 
savour  of  gaiety,  of  the  quips  and  cranks  and  wanton  wiles 
of  youth,  that  must  have  been  a  welcome  refreshment  to 
readers  weary  of  the  descendants  of  Rene  and  of  Ober- 
mann,  whose  melancholy  had  threatened  for  a  time  to 
eclipse  the  normal  Gallic  spirit.  Socially,  too,  the  novels 
of  Kock  are  in  sharp  contrast  to  those  of  Chateaubriand, 
Stael,  and  the  romanticists.  They  are  bourgeois,  demo- 
cratic, vulgar  even,  but  they  are  not  immoral.  They  de- 
mand no  literary  training,  they  gratify  no  delicate  taste. 
His  hundred  volumes  passed  almost  unnoticed  by  the  crit- 
ics, but  they  were  very  popular  during  the  Restoration  and 
the  Orleanist  regime,  that  period  of  well-fed  ease  in  which 
the  commercial  class  sought  repose  rather  than  stimulus  in 
fiction,  as  they  did  in  the  dramas  of  Scribe.  As  typical  of 
the  bourgeois  taste  of  their  time  The  Barber  of  Paris  (le 
Barbier  de  Paris),  Andre  the  Savoyard^  Gus  the  Unruly 
(Gustave  le  mauvais  sujet) ,  and  The  Milkinaid  of  Montfermeil 
(la  Laitiere  de  Montfermeil) ,  still  merit  the  attention  of  the 
student. 

Another  voluminous  novelist,  whose  work  falls  between 
1837  and  i860,  is  Joseph  M^ry,  whose  specialty  is  exotic 
landscape,  done  with  such  lively  fancy  that  it  is  said 
many  were  lured  by  the  mirage  of  his  imagination  to  visit 
India  and   China,  countries  that  the  novelist  had  never 


84        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

seen.  Even  more  rapid  was  the  production  of  Fr^d^ric 
Souli^,  who  may  be  justly  called  a  victim  of  the  fetnlletoii, 
for  he  had  talent.  He  gives  us  in  his  Memoirs  of  the  Devil 
(les  Memoires  du  diable,  1837)  the  extreme  of  romantic 
horror  and  barbarity,  after  the  manner  of  Hugo's  Han  of 
Icelandy  and  was  for  a  time  very  popular,  though  his  work 
contains  nothing  to  promise  or  justify  a  revival  of  his 
reputation. 

A  more  deplorable  victim  of  the  fetdlleton  was  L^on 
Gozlan,  among  the  most  fantastic  and  eccentric  of  the 
romantic  novelists,  with  a  fancy  stimulated  by  foreign  travel 
and  a  vein  of  delicate  satire.  His  Aristide  Froissart  (1843) 
and  The  Emotions  of  Poly  dor e  Marasquin  suggest  that  he 
would  have  done  more  had  he  done  less,  and  might  indeed 
have  achieved  a  permanent  place  in  French  literature. 

Perhaps  the  best  representative  of  the  individualistic 
vagaries  of  romanticism,  whether  we  regard  his  style  or  his 
thought,  is  Jules  Janin,  whose  later  novels  still  have  charm 
for  dainty  spirits.  The  author  calls  them  "  idylls  with 
court- plaster  patches."  Stories  like  The  Nun  of  Toulouse 
(la  R^ligieuse  de  Toulouse,  1850),  or  Country  Gaieties  (les 
Gaiet^s  champetres,  185 1),  seem  like  Dresden  china  re- 
productions of  the  days  of  Louis  XV.,  fragile,  not  natural, 
yet  charming.  His  earlier  novels  are  trivial  and  ultra- 
romantic. 

Another  prodigy  of  fecundity  is  lEmile  Souvestre,  who 
from  1835  to  his  death  averaged  three  volumes  a  year  of 
almost  unvarying  mediocrity.  He  comes  to  us  burdened 
with  the  title  of  the  schoolmaster  in  literature,  for  he 
strove  to  make  his  novels  useful,  and  naturally  made  them 
prosy.  At  his  best,  when  dealing  with  his  native  Brittany 
in  The  Last  Bretons  (les  Derniers  br^tons,  1835-7)  and  The 


Dumas  and  the  Napoleonic  Generation   85 

Breton  Hearth  (le  Foyer  br^ton,  1844),  he  is  still  readable, 
but  he  has  more  of  the  seriousness  than  of  the  poetic  fancy 
of  his  race. 

In  such  early  stories  of  Alphonse  Karr  as  Under  the  Wil- 
lows (Sous  les  tilleuls,  1832)  we  feel  something  of  the 
romantic  passion  of  George  Sand's  Indiana.  Sentiment  is 
pushed  to  morbid  intensity.  His  later  and  very  numerous 
novels,  of  which  any  volume  taken  at  random  will  give  the 
tone,  show  rather  a  fantastic  and  stinging  humour  that  half 
justified  the  comparison  he  invited  with  the  Aristophanes 
of  The  Wasps.  His  earlier  manner  was  continued  by 
Ars^ne  Houssaye,  who  produced  a  huge  mass  of  individually 
insignificant  novels.  They  all  have  some  wit,  but  their  com- 
mon characteristic  is  rather  a  sentimental  smile  that  degene- 
rates easily  and  frequently  into  a  tearful  smirk. 

Decidedly  more  robust,  perhaps  because  less  prolific,  are 
Bernard  and  Sandeau.  The  latter  had  much  in  common 
with  George  Sand,  with  whom  he  had  collaborated,  but  to 
her  romantic  talent  and  psychologic  intuition  he  added  a 
keener  sense  of  humour  and  a  greater  faculty  of  patient  ob- 
servation. He  took  for  his  domain  the  rich  bourgeois  whom 
the  revolution  of  1830  had  brought  to  the  front  politically, 
while  leaving  them  still  aspirants  for  social  recognition  by  a 
poor  but  proud  aristocracy.  This  conflict  between  the 
emigrant  nobles  and  the  purchasers  of  their  confiscated 
estates,  and  its  effect  on  their  character,  is  the  common 
subject  of  Mile,  de  la  Seigliere  (1848),  Green-bags  and 
Parchments  (Sacs  et  parchemins,  185 1),  The  Mansion  of 
Penarvan  (la  Maison  de  Penarvan,  1858).  This  social 
conflict  still  interests,  because  in  altered  form  it  still  exists ; 
and  so,  though  Sandeau  never  achieved  a  brilliant  success 
as  a  novelist,  his  reputation  has  shown  a  vigorous  life.     He 


86        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

is  soundly  virile  yet  sunny,  cheerful,  and  charming,  and  a 
delightful  painter  of  landscape.  His  morality  joined  to  his 
graceful  and  sympathetic  irony  have  commended  him  par- 
ticularly to  the  feminine  arbiters  of  the  novelist's  fate,  but 
to  all  who  wish  to  understand  the  social  movement  under 
Louis  Philippe  he  will  be  an  essential  supplement  on  a 
single  side  to  the  universal  genius  of  Balzac. 

The  first  avowed  disciple  of  Balzac  was  Charles  de  Ber- 
nard, but  he  was  so  inapt  a  pupil  that  he  resembles  rather 
Paul  de  Kock.  His  novels  and  tales  show  a  curious  inter- 
mingling of  the  romantic  hair-breadth  'scape,  the  hidden 
closet,  the  secret  drawer,  and  the  solitary  horseman  with 
realistic  pictures  of  the  society  of  1840.  He  has  good 
intentions,  but  no  insight  into  character,  little  patience 
and  less  genius.  One  thinks  of  him  less  as  a  great  novelist 
than  as  a  pleasant  time-killer,  yet  he  cannot  be  passed  over, 
for  he  helped  to  prepare  the  public  for  the  radical  natural- 
ism of  the  next  generation.  His  longer  novels  do  not  hold 
the  attention,  and  they  irritate  at  times  by  a  moral  callous- 
ness, but  his  five  volumes  of  short  stories  have  proved  a 
mine  to  later  novelists,  who  have  read  and  used  more  than 
they  have  acknowledged. 

It  is  said  that  when,  in  the  heyday  of  romanticism,  the 
more  sober  of  its  friends  urged  Xavier  de  Maistre  to  repro- 
duce for  them  the  charm  of  his  Young  Siberian  Girl,  he 
called  their  attention  to  an  obscure  professor  of  rhetoric, 
Rudolphe  Topffer  of  Geneva,  who,  he  said,  might  spare  his 
labour  and  satisfy  their  desire.  This  stimulus  produced  the 
Genevese  Tales  (1840)  and  two  novels,  all  simple  and  yet 
artistic  in  construction,  somewhat  archaic  in  style,  as  befits 
the  city  of  Protestant  refugees,  witty  and  sound,  yet  with  a 
childlike  fancy  and  play  of  sentiment  as  fresh  as  Alpine  hay. 


Dumas  and  the  Napoleonic  Generation  87 

Topfifer's  shrewd  observation  is  salted  with  humour  and  inter- 
penetrated with  Christian  grace  and  charity,  so  that  to  read 
him  is,  as  Sainte-Beuve  said,  one  of  the  sweetest,  most  win- 
ning, and  healthiest  of  literary  pleasures. 

A  curious  interest  attaches  to  the  fiction  of  Barbey 
d'Aurevilly,  most  eccentric  of  romantic  degenerates,  full  of 
obscure  and  bizarre  affectations  and  aristocratic  virtuosity, 
but  falling  at  the  close  of  his  literary  activity  under  strange 
hallucinations  of  moral  perversion  of  which  the  interest  is 
pathological  rather  than  literary.  Of  his  earlier  manner, 
The  Bewitched  (I'Ensorcel^e,  1854)  may  serve  as  a  type ; 
of  the  latter,  The  Possessed  (les  Diaboliques,  1874). 

It  remains  to  speak  of  two  one-volume  novelists,  Claude 
Tillier  and  Xavier  Saintine.  The  former  is  remembered 
solely  for  J/y  Uncle  Benjamin  (Mon  oncle  Benjamin,  1843), 
a  book  whose  circle  of  readers,  never  large,  shows  no  signs 
of  diminution.  It  is  a  piece  of  genial  satire,  neither  strong 
nor  deep,  but  not  unworthy  to  be  classed  with  Topffer's 
Genevese  Tales ^  as  of  like  though  not  equal  merit.  Saintine 
was  a  far  more  productive  writer,  who  during  twenty-eight 
years  of  tireless  writing  had  a  brief  moment  of  inspiration 
in  which  it  was  given  him  to  conceive  Picciola,  a  story  that 
brought  him  a  decoration,  the  Montyon  prize,  and  a  place 
in  the  gentle  hearts  of  his  generation,  who  have  handed 
down  its  fragrant  memory  as  a  tradition  to  ours.  It  is  the 
story  of  a  prisoner  and  a  flower,  tender  yet  sound  in  its 
pathos,  sentimental  but  not  mawkish.  It  has  been  im- 
mensely popular,  and  is  perhaps  still  much  read,  though  like 
many  other  popular  books  it  has  not  influenced  the  writers 
who  influenced  in  their  turn,  and  so  the  effect  of  its  thou- 
sands of  readers  on  the  development  of  fiction  is  almost  as 
imperceptible  as  that  of  the  fairy  tales  of  Laboulaye. 


CHAPTER  V 

THE   DEVELOPMENT  OF   BALZAC 

T)  ALZAC  is  the  greatest  novelist  of  France,  and  perhaps 
-*-^  of  the  world.  In  greater  measure  than  it  is  given  to 
most  writers  to  realise  their  ideals,  he  was  what  he  aspired* 
to  be,  —  "  the  secretary  of  society ;  "  and  the  fifty  volumes  of 
his  Comedie  humaine  are  indeed  "an  illumination  thrown 
upon  life,"  or  rather  on  three  lives,  —  on  the  life  of  the 
Empire,  of  the  Restoration,  and  of  the  Orleanist  monarchy, 
in  all  their  varied  manifestations  both  of  ages  and  of  states. 
With  certain  reserves  and  obvious  exceptions  it  may  be 
said  that  his  Scenes  of  Private  Life  are  studies  in  the  psy- 
chology of  normal  youth,  those  of  the  Provinces  are  typical 
of  middle  Hfe,  while  the  few  studies  of  country  life  seem 
concerned  with  old  age.  But  all  his  types  are  influenced 
by  occupation,  and  Balzac's  Comedie,  beginning  thus  as  a 
comedy  of  character,  turns  in  the  Scenes  of  Parisian  Life 
and  still  more  obviously  in  the  Scenes  of  Military  and  Politi- 
cal Life  into  a  comedy  of  states,  while  both  are  supplemented 
by  the  analytic  studies  on  the  conjugal  relation  and  by  the 
much  more  numerous  "  philosophic  studies,"  in  which  the 
author  deals  with  various  forms  of  mental  and  moral  divaga- 
tion and  monomania. 

To  produce  this  social  comedy  Balzac  created  something 
more  than  two  thousand  characters,  all  of  whom  seem  to 
have  had  as  real  an  existence  in  his  mind  as  the  men  who 


The  Development  of  Balzac         89 

lived  and  moved  about  him.  There  are  times  when  he 
seems  almost  under  an  hallucination,  a  clairvoyant  in  whom 
the  imagination  has  taken  possession  of  the  senses  and  the  V 
visions  become  more  real  than  the  reality.  That  story  of 
Jules  Sandeau  telling  Balzac  of  his  sister's  illness,  to  whom 
the  novelist  listens  for  a  time  only  to  interrupt  with  the 
remark,  ^'All  that's  very  well,  my  friend,  but  let's  come 
back  to  reality;  let's  talk  about  Eugenie  Grandet,"  can 
be  paralleled  by  a  score  of  passages  from  his  familiar 
correspondence.  Thus  his  characters  become  so  real  to 
him  that  their  least  actions  are  characteristic  of  their  nature, 
and  recall  »all  that  we  know  of  fhem.  Their  fortunes  are 
so  interlinked  with  one  another  that  they  seem  to  consti- 
tute of  themselves  a  complete  microcosm,  of  which  it  is 
possible  to  compile  in  all  seriousness,  as  Christophe  and 
Cerfbeer  have  done,  a  biographical  dictionary. 

Of  course  in  a  work  so  vast  all  is  not  completed  nor  is 
all  of  equal  merit.  As  Zola  has  said  in  a  finely  sustained 
metaphor :  — 

"  The  Comedie  humaine  is  like  a  Tower  of  Babel  that  the 
hand  of  the  architect  did  not  have  and  would  never  have  had 
time  to  finish.  Some  of  its  walls  seem  as  though  they  would 
crumble  for  age  and  cumber  the  ground  with  their  ddbris.  The 
workman  has  used  all  materials  that  fell  under  his  hand,  plaster, 
cement,  stone,  marble,  even  sand  and  mud  from  the  ditch  ;  and 
with  his  strong  arms  and  with  these  materials  taken  at  hazard 
he  has  erected  his  edifice,  his  gigantic  tower,  without  always 
heeding  harmony  of  lines  or  balanced  proportion  in  his  work. 
You  seem  to  hear  him  panting  in  his  workshop,  cutting  the 
blocks  with  heavy  mallet-blows,  indifferent  to  grace  and  deli- 
cacy of  outline.  You  seem  to  see  him  mounting  heavily  the 
staging,  building  here  a  great,  bare,  rough  wall,  and  there  erect- 
ing colonnades  of  a  serene  majesty,  making  porticos  and  peri- 


90        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

styles,  of  plaster  and  of  marble,  that  human  pride  has  sought  to 
raise  to  heaven,  and  whose  unfinished  walls  already  cover  the 
ground.  Black  cavities  appear  in  this  series  of  superposed 
storeys.  Here  and  there  a  cornice  is  gone.  A  few  winter  rains 
have  sufficed  to  make  the  plaster  crumble  that  in  his  haste  the 
workman  too  often  used.  But  all  the  marble  stands  firm,  all 
the  colonnades,  all  the  friezes  are  there  intact,  widened,  whit- 
ened by  time.  The  workman  has  built  his  tower  with  such  an 
instinct  of  the  great  and  eternal  that  the  body  of  the  edifice  will 
probably  remain  always  entire.  Walls  may  crumble,  floors 
may  sink,  stairways  may  fall,  but  the  stone  courses  will  resist 
still,  the  great  tower  will  rise  as  clear,  as  high,  supported  on 
the  broad  bases  of  its  giant  columns.  Little  by  little  all  that  is 
mud  and  sand  will  pass  away,  and  then  the  marble  body  of  the 
monument  will  appear  still  on  the  horizon  like  the  silhouette  of 
a  great  city." 

In  this  truly  titanic  task  Balzac  lived  absorbed  in  great 
measure,  though  his  recently  published  correspondence 
shows  that  he  found  time,  how  we  can  hardly  conceive,  for 
various  other  attachments,  as  well  as  for  the  love  for 
Madame  Hanska  that  began  in  1829  and  lasted  till  his 
death  in  1850.  Nor  do  the  fifty  volumes  of  fiction  pro- 
duced during  this  period,  though  representing  an  average 
production  of  six  hundred  words  a  day,  besides  the  labour  of 
proof-read ing,  which  Balzac  made  almost  equivalent  to  re- 
composition,  represent  by  any  means  his  whole  literary  pro- 
ductivity. There  are  still  to  be  reckoned  the  two  volumes 
of  dramas,  a  large  number  of  critical  articles  and  letters, 
the  Rabelaisian  Droll  Stories^  and  some  thirty  volumes  of 
unsigned  youthful  fiction,  part  of  which  was  produced  in 
collaboration  with  others,  and  none  of  it  acknowledged  by 
the  author  or  now  included  in  his  works.  And  yet,  though 
it  might  seem  that  here,  if  ever,  it  could  be  said  that  a 


The  Development  of  Balzac         91 

man's  writings  were  his  biography,  we  shall  find  in  the  cir- 
cumstances of  Balzac's  early  life  some  elements  essential  to 
the  comprehension  of  his  novels ;  and  to  this  therefore  we 
first  turn. 

Balzac  was  born  on  the  sixteenth  of  May,  1799,  at  Tours, 
and  of  typical  Touranian  stock,  epicurean,  pantagruelistic, 
except  for  the  humour,  and  not  at  all  literary.  The  family 
was  in  comfortable  circumstances.  Honore  was  the  first  of 
four  children,  one  of  whom  died  young,  and  another  "  left 
his  country  for  his  country's  good  "  and  fades  from  sight  in 
the  colonies.  The  third  and  the  only  one  important  to  us 
is  Laura,  the  first  intimate  friend  of  Honor^,  and  to  the  last 
the  most  sympathetic  of  all,  the  confidante  to  whom,  at 
least  in  early  life,  he  pours  out  his  whole  heart ;  and  it  was 
she  who  rescued  his  memory  from  ghoulish  gossip  and  to 
whom  we  owe  a  rational  knowledge  of  his  arduous  begin- 
nings. It  is  she  who  tells  us  that  Honor^'s  father  was 
a  combination  of  Montaigne,  Rabelais,  and  Uncle  Toby, 
and  that  his  mother,  who  was  rich,  beautiful,  and  much 
younger  than  her  husband,  had  "  a  vivacious  imagination,  a 
tenacious  will,  and  unwearied  activity,"  which  seems  to  be 
a  dutiful  way  of  saying  that  she  was  nervous,  domineering, 
and  fussy.  The  first  four  years  of  his  life  were  spent  with  a 
foster  mother  in  the  country.  When  he  returned  to  Tours 
he  showed  no  cleverness  at  school  and  found  no  apprecia- 
tion at  home.  At  seven  he  went  to  a  clerical  school,  where 
he  remained  till  he  was  fourteen,  when  he  was  brought 
home,  apparently  in  a  state  of  nervous  prostration,  with 
which,  however,  his  teacher  averred  that  study  could  not 
possibly  have  had  anything  to  do. 

Of  this  school  life  Balzac  has  left  us  an  interesting  and, 
in  places,  pathetic  picture  in  Louis  Lambert,     He  had  hina* 


92        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

self  while  there  written  that  essay  "  On  the  Will "  that  he 
attributes  to  his  friend,  and  he  never  quite  forgave  the 
teacher  who  burned  it,  to  punish  him  for  his  neglect  of  pre- 
scribed duty.  At  home  he  became  for  a  time  a  diligent 
pupil  of  the  Truant  School  {Tecole  buissonniere)^  interpene- 
trating his  nature  with  the  placid  breadth  and  rich  fertility 
of  the  Touranian  landscape,  with  its  sparkling  river  Loire, 
its  terraced  vineyards,  the  noisy  cooper-shops  of  Saint-Sym- 
phorien,  and  the  ruin  of  Plessis,  that  he  was  himself  to  do 
so  much  to  make  a  familiar  word  to  all  readers  of  the  Droll 
Stories.  The  influence  of  these  years  can  be  felt  through  all 
his  work,  and  it  was  never  stronger  perhaps  than  at  the 
very  last. 

It  was  in  these  years  at  Tours  that  he  began  to  have  what 
his  sister  calls  the  intuition  of  renown,  that  is,  the  conscious- 
ness that  he  had  a  literary  vocation ;  and  he  had  no  sooner 
reached  this  stage  than  a  kind  literary  providence  took  him 
with  his  parents  to  Paris  (1814),  which  remained  his  resi- 
dence for  the  rest  of  his  life,  though  his  father  was  con- 
strained to  leave  it  in  1819.  Here  he  continued  his  edu- 
cation, and  presently  came  into  contact  with  the  intellectual 
lights  of  the  Sorbonne,  Guizot,  Villemain,  and  Cousin,  who 
stimulated  greatly  his  literary  activity.  For  three  years  he 
studied  law,  an  apprenticeship  without  which  he  could 
hardly  have  written  several  of  his  novels,  and  more  espe- 
cially Cesar  Birotteau.  But  he  refused  to  practise,  much 
to  the  chagrin  of  his  father,  who  had  lost  his  post  and  the 
greater  part  of  his  property.  The  family  relations  became 
strained  as  the  first  efforts  at  literary  expression  proved 
quite  without  success.  His  parents  lost  faith  and  patience. 
The  pressure  of  poverty  evokes  from  him  a  pathetic  cry. 
He  does  not  doubt  his  vocation,  but  he  doubts  his  power. 


The  Development  of  Balzac         93 

"  I  am  young  and  hungry,"  he  writes,  "  and  there  is  nothing 
on  my  plate.  Laura,  Laura  :  —  my  two  boundless  desires, 
my  only  ones  —  to  be  famous  and  to  be  loved  —  will  they 
ever  be  satisfied !  " 

And  now  follows  a  period  of  ten  years  (18 19-1829), 
which  so  far  as  accomplishment  is  concerned  is  negligible, 
but  not  so  if  we  would  watch  the  development  of  the 
writer's  genius.  They  taught  him  his  trade,  the  manipula- 
tion of  the  novelistic  tools.  Of  thought  he  never  had  lack, 
but  fluent  expression  he  was  slow  in  acquiring,  and  the 
careful  reader  will  feel  that,  though  he  took  infinite  pains, 
he  rarely  satisfied  himself.  "  Do  not  read  that,"  he  said  to 
a  friend  who  had  one  of  these  early  volumes  in  his  hand, 
"  I  have  in  my  head  novels  that  I  think  are  good,  but  I  do 
not  know  when  they  may  be  able  to  get  out  of  it."  The 
fourteen  romances  of  these  years  appeared  under  various 
pseudonyms,  and  were  classified  by  contemporary  criticism 
with  those  of  Pigault-Lebrun  and  Restif.  Perhaps  the 
most  interesting  thing  about  them  is  the  premonition  in  a 
preface  to  the  Vicar  of  Ardennes  in  1822  of  the  co-ordina- 
tion of  a  series  of  novels  such  as  he  afterward  realised  in 
the  Human  Comedy,  as  well  as  the  stubborn  persistency 
that  such  a  conception  of  the  novel  implies.  For  here  he 
invites  his  readers  to  note  well  the  characters  that  he  intro- 
duces, since,  as  he  tells  them,  they  will  have  to  follow  their 
fortunes  through  thirty  novels  to  come  ;  and  though  this  was 
in  that  case  without  even  the  beginning  of  a  fulfilment,  yet 
it  shows  the  cyclopean  character  of  his  imagination,  that 
after  these  years  of  prodigal  effort  suddenly  revealed  itself 
capable  of  lofty  and  sustained  flight. 

Of  the  struggles,  hardships,  and  disappointments  of  these 
ten  years  the  letters  preserved  in  the  correspondence  bear 


94        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

an  often  pathetic  witness.  He  writes  under  pressure  always, 
and  always  with  the  feeling  that  there  is  in  his  mind  more 
than  he  has  power  to  express.  Yet  even  in  poverty  and 
while  harassed  with  debts,  he  shows  himself  at  times  the 
victim  of  overmastering  caprices,  though  at  times  capable  of 
a  sustained  intensity  of  labour  that  is  quite  marvellous.  He 
begrudges  the  time  that  he  spends  in  letter-writing,  and 
still  more  the  time  that  he  must  devote  to  the  care  of  his 
bachelor  household,  "  economising  his  steps  "  that  he  may 
have  more  time  to  write  and  gradually  to  attain  a  position 
where  he  can  sign  himself  '*  Honore,  public  scrivener  and 
French  poet  at  two  francs  a  page."  His  unsigned  novels, 
in  four  volumes  each,  begin  to  pay  him  two,  three,  even  four 
hundred  dollars,  but  always  in  notes  not  readily  negotiable. 
He  got  no  cash  for  his  work  till  toward  the  close  of  this 
period,  and  meantime  he  had  got  himself  deeper  in  debt 
than  ever,  so  that  in  1827  we  find  him  working  on  The 
Chouans  (les  Chouans)  "  with  a  tired  brain  and  an  anx- 
ious mind,"  with  eight  or  ten  business  letters  that  he  must 
write  every  day  before  he  could  sit  down  to  his  work,  and 
feeling  that  the  demands  of  his  family  were  "  as  unreason- 
able as  it  would  be  to  disturb  a  founder  during  a  casting." 
"  Postage  and  an  omnibus  are  extravagances  that  I  cannot 
allow  myself,"  he  writes ;  "  I  stay  at  home  so  as  not  to  wear 
out  my  clothes.  Is  that  clear?"  he  says  with  vexation  as 
late  as  1827  ;  and  though  during  the  next  two  years  his  let- 
ters show  that  he  is  beginning  to  form  stimulating  literary 
friendships,  it  was  as  an  author  rich  only  in  hope  and  with 
thirty-five  mediocre  volumes  to  outlive  that  he  made  his 
first  acknowledged  literary  venture. 

In  The   Chouans  the  unique  genius  of  Balzac  was  first 
apparent,  more  apparent  than  in  work  written  during  the 


The  Development  of  Balzac         95 

two  succeeding  years,  if  indeed  it  be  true,  as  he  states,  that 
the  book  was  finished  in  1827.  A  greater  gulf  separates 
it  from  anything  printed  before  1830  than  from  anything 
that  follows.  And  yet  the  novel  has  glaring  defects,  and 
not  a  few  of  them.  The  attempt  to  imitate  Scott  is  more 
obvious  than  successful,  the  descriptions  are  far  too  long 
and  too  numerous,  and  the  plot,  though  said  to  be  founded 
on  fact,  is  almost  ludicrously  romantic,  —  a  fact  that  has 
made  this  novel  one  of  the  most  popular  with  the  masses. 
What  shall  we  say  of  a  heroine,  a  republican  spy,  who  "  had 
seen  Hfe  pass  till  then  like  an  unattainable  shadow  that  she 
had  always  wished  to  seize.  Having  sown  with  full  hand 
and  reaped  nothing,  she  remained  a  virgin,  irritated  by 
a  multitude  of  deceived  desires.  Then,  weary  of  a  contest 
without  adversaries,  she  came  in  her  despair  to  prefer  good 
to  evil  when  it  offered  pleasure,  evil  to  good  when  it  offered 
poetry,  misery  to  mediocrity  as  something  more  grandiose, 
the  unknown  future  of  death  to  a  life  poor  in  hopes  or  even 
in  sufferings."  This  is  romanticism  reduced  to  the  absurd. 
And  as  though  this  were  not  enough,  there  is  the  impossible 
lover,  Montauran,  and  Corentin,  the  police  agent  with  the 
basilisk  green  eyes,  as  the  readers  of  our  dime-novels  know 
him,  a  warning  example  unheeded  even  by  the  great  Hugo, 
not  at  all  the  grandiose  conception  of  the  same  character  in 
later  novels. 

But  on  the  other  hand,  in  its  resuscitation  of  the  Brittany 
of  1799,  The  Chouans  is  one  of  the  first  and  best  of  the 
historical  novels  of  France.  Some  scenes,  with  not  a  few 
conversations  and  observations  by  the  way,  are  of  the  best, 
and  quite  worthy  of  Balzac's  genius.  And  yet,  in  spite  of 
this  success,  Balzac  turned  resolutely  from  the  battle-fields 
of  history  to  those  of  domestic  life,  convinced  that  for  the 


96        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

task  he  already  felt  before  him  he  must  pass  through 
an  apprenticeship  in  the  miniature  work  of  a  Memmling 
or  the  petty  realism  of  a  Gerard  Dow  before  he  could  pre- 
sume to  paint  the  gigantic  frescos  of  passion. 

So  in  November,  1829,  we  find  Balzac  writing  to  his 
publisher :  *'  I  work  all  day  on  the  Physiology  of  Marriage, 
and  give  only  six  hours  of  the  night  (from  nine  to  two) 
to  the  Scenes  of  Domestic  Life,  of  which  I  have  only  to 
correct  the  proofs.  ...  I  am  ready  to  send  the  necessary 
copy  to  finish  the  15th  if  you  wish,  but  we  should  have 
committed  the  most  odious  assassination  on  a  book.  .  .  . 
It's  a  matter  of  selHng  inked  paper  at  seven  or  at  fifty 
francs  a  ream.  I  work  as  zealously  and  as  steadily  as  any 
human  creature  can,  but  I  am  only  the  very  humble  servant 
of  the  muse,  and  that  minx  pouts  sometimes." 

To  this  intense  labour  Balzac  was  constrained  by  debts, 
amounting  in  1828  to  120,000  francs,  and  discharged  with 
scrupulous  honour,  though  constantly  renewed  by  the  ex- 
travagant whimsicalities  of  the  now  popular  author.  He 
was  hardly  ever  free  from  the  pressure  of  debt  until  the 
closing  years  of  his  life.  At  times  he  had  been  perilously 
near  bankruptcy,  and  in  1828  had  been  saved  from  it  only 
by  the  generous  aid  of  Madame  de  Berny,  a  woman  who 
exercised  perhaps  the  strongest  moral  influence,  after  his 
mother  and  sister,  on  the  early  development  of  his  charac- 
ter. "  In  my  greatest  troubles  she  sustained  me  by  words 
and  deeds,"  he  writes :  "  that  which  she  had  already 
roughly  moulded  in  me  I  work  now  to  complete."  Madame 
Firmiani  and,  above  all,  Madame  de  Mortsauf  in  The  Lily 
in  the  Valley  are  monuments  of  pious  love  erected  to  her 
memory.  For  she  passed  speedily  from  Balzac's  life,  falHng 
sick  in  1834  and  dying  in  1836. 


The  Development  of  Balzac         97 

Balzac  regarded  the  Physiology  of  Marriage  then  and  for 
several  years  later  with  a  complacency  that  his  critics  can- 
not share.  It  is  a  rather  shallow  monograph  on  adultery, 
redeemed  by  a  few  keen  observations  and  well- told  stories, 
adding  nothing  to  the  reputation  of  the  author  and  interest- 
ing chiefly  for  its  early  date.  But  at  this  very  time  he  was 
doing  in  the  Scenes  of  Domestic  Life,  six  stories  published 
in  April,  1830,  work  of  a  far  higher  order,  while  he  had 
begun  also  a  novel  on  Cardinal  Mazarin  that  he  never 
found  occasion  to  finish. 

In  January  of  1830  Balzac  printed  El  Verdttgo  (Spanish 
for  "The  Executioner"),  a  brief  contribution  to  the  shud- 
der in  literature,  from  the  war  of  Spanish  independence. 
The  conception  of  a  family  feeling  so  overmastering  that  a 
father  shall  beg  his  son  to  be  a  parricide,  that  brothers  and 
sisters  shall  join  in  the  prayer,  and  that  the  son  shall  accede 
to  their  wish,  to  save  the  family  name,  is  an  idea  so  roman- 
tic that  only  the  greatest  artistic  restraint  could  make  it  tol- 
erable.    Balzac  has  made  it  worthy  of  admiration. 

This  was  followed^  by  Gobseckj  the  first  of  those  mar- 
vellous studies  of  avarice,  morbid  visions  of  the  power 
of  wealth  and  of  its  cancerous  grip  on  the  soul,  that 
resulted  not  unnaturally  from  his  financial  anxieties  and 
hungry  imagination.  Even  old  Grandet,  though  painted 
in  more  detail,  is  hardly  a  more  remarkable  picture  of 
miserly  degeneration  than  this  Dutch  Parisian  Jew,  while 
in  the  death-bed  of  Count  Restaud  Balzac  has  given  us 
one  of  the  most  ghastly  scenes  of  horror  to  be  found  in  all 
fiction. 

Together  with  Gobseck  during  February,  1830,  Balzac 
had  been  writing  his  first  Study  of  Woman  (fitude  de 
femme),  a  little  story  of  feminine  pique  that  calls  for  no 

7 


98        A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

further  notice,  and  April  brought  five  scenes  of  private  life 
to  make  up  with  Gobseck  the  two  volumes  first  published 
under  that  title.  These  bear  various  dates,  from  July,  1829, 
to  February,  1830;  but  as  we  know  that  Balzac  changed 
much  in  his  proofs,  suggesting  in  one  case  to  his  publisher 
that  it  would  be  cheaper  to  have  the  whole  work  com- 
posed anew,  it  is  wiser  throughout  to  follow  the  order  of 
publication,  for,  so  far  as  we  can  see,  Balzac  never  finished 
anything  till  it  was  published,  and  felt  his  reputation  in  peril 
if  he  did  not  see  two  or  even  three  sets  of  proofs. 

Of  these  five  scenes,  the  first  in  time,  Dofuesiic  Peace 
(la  Paix  de  manage),  dated  July,  1829,  seems  to  have 
been  composed  under  less  sombre  conditions  than  Gobseck 
or  El  VerdugOj  for,  though  it  is  the  first  of  Balzac's  many 
studies  of  the  effect  of  adultery  on  domestic  life,  we  have 
here,  what  is  quite  the  exception  with  him,  an  attempt  at 
comedy  and  a  happy  ending.  Perhaps  we  are  to  attribute 
this  to  his  growing  intimacy  with  the  Duchess  of  Abrantfes, 
to  whom  he  now  begins  to  write  familiarly. 

The  Cat  and  the  Racket  (la  Maison  du  chat-qui-pelote) 
of  October,  1829,  stands  in  striking  contrast  to  anything 
that  the  author  had  at  that  time  done  or  attempted,  and 
witnesses  also  to  a  mind  less  racked  and  strained  than  the 
crowded  productions  of  1830,  '31,  and  '32.  Its  opening 
scene  is  a  masterly  description  of  a  draper's  shop  under 
the  still  simple  conditions  of  commerce  in  Napoleon's  day, 
when  clerks  dined  at  the  master's  table  and  left  it  humbly 
before  the  dessert  was  served,  while,  as  in  the  Germany 
of  Freytag's  Soil  und  Haben,  each  member  of  the  house- 
hold had  an  active  share  in  the  business.  The  heart  of 
this  story  is  in  the  relation  of  the  artist,  Sommervieux,  to 
Ang^lique,  whose  love  he  first  returns,  then  tolerates,  then 


The  Development  of  Balzac         99 

spurns,  as  she  had  done  the  love  of  her  father's  clerk 
Joseph,  who  marries  her  sister  Virginie  —  and  the  business. 
This  sensible  couple  "  live  happy  ever  after,"  while  Ang^- 
lique,  afflicted  by  the  counsels  of  mother,  sister,  and  rival, 
sinks  faithful  and  sorrowing  to  an  early  grave.  The  story 
is  brief  and  admirable  in  its  restrained  strength.  It  has 
flashes  of  insight  that  in  one  of  Balzac's  then  age  and 
experience  seem  clairvoyant.  He  was  to  plead  often  for 
conventional  marriage,  but  seldom  with  more  eloquence 
than  in  this  story,  which  alone  should  have  revealed  him 
to  his  generation  as  their  master  in  social  psychology. 

A  far  slighter  thing  is  The  Ball  at  Sceaux  (le  Bal  de 
Sceaux),  weak  in  its  analysis  of  overweening  girlish  pride, 
but  interesting  as  the  first  of  many  attempts  to  bring  the 
new  social  ideals  into  effective  contrast  with  those  inherited 
from  the  old  social  regime.  Then  in  The  Vendetta  the 
cloud  that  we  felt  in  Gobseck  casts  its  shadow  over 
a  sad  tale  of  the  struggle  of  love  with  poverty  and  with 
the  Satanic  intensity  of  Corsican  passion.  As  markedly  ro- 
mantic and  even  more  luridly  intense  is  the  later  part  of 
A  Double  Family  (une  Double  famille),  of  which  the  earlier 
portion  had  drawn  a  prettily  romantic  picture  of  the  ideal 
grisette  and  the  primrose  path  of  unrecognized  connections. 
This  opening,  however,  sinks  into  insignificance  beside 
the  strength  of  the  close,  where  with  terrible  concision  we  are 
shown  the  poison  that  a  bigoted  wife  and  a  meddlesome 
priest  can  cast  over  domestic  life.  The  analysis  may  be 
no  keener  here  than  in  The  Cat  and  the  Rackety  but  the 
flashes  of  genius  are  more  frequent  and  the  author  seems 
to  grow  more  conscious  of  his  power. 

Almost  at  the  same  time  with  these  scenes  of  private  life 
there  was  published  The  Two  Dreams  (les  Deux  reves), 


loo     A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

said  to  have  been  written  in  1828  and  now  forming  the 
third  part  of  Catherine  de'  Medici  (Sur  Catherine  de  Medi- 
cis).  This  defence  of  the  Massacre  of  Saint  Bartholomew 
is  curiously  interpenetrated  with  the  spirit  of  the  Italian 
renascence,  but  it  calls  for  no  extended  notice.  Then  in 
May  appeared  Adieu^  a  masterpiece  of  tragic  pathos,  and 
containing  in  its  picture  of  the  passage  of  the  Beresina  dur- 
ing the  retreat  from  Moscow  one  of  the  four  or  five  great 
military  pictures  in  all  French  literature,  a  picture  whose 
accumulated  horrors  might  well  have  produced  the  pathetic 
madness  of  its  heroine.  She  recovers  only  to  die  and  to 
leave  her  lover  no  escape  from  memory  but  suicide.  Here 
at  the  outset  of  his  mature  career  the  gloomy  strength  of 
Balzac's  genius  already  touches  its  climax. 

Amid  a  mass  of  journalistic  work,  of  which  the  titles 
alone  occupy  two  octavo  pages,  Balzac  produced  also  dur- 
ing this  year  in  October  The  Elixir  of  Long  Life  (I'Elixir 
de  longue  vie),  a  fantastic  story  adapted  from  the  German 
of  Hoffmann  just  at  that  culmination  of  French  roman- 
ticism when,  as  Balzac  says,  "  every  author  was  '  doing  the 
atrocious  *  to  please  the  young  ladies."  His  Don  Juan  was 
meant  to  be  a  universal  mocker,  and  the  story,  as  an  orgy 
of  fantastic  hypocrisy,  is  a  tour  de  force  of  considerable 
power. 

November  brought  Sarrasine,  of  which  it  may  suffice 
to  say  that  its  scene  is  Italy  and  its  subject  the  unnatural 
love  of  a  French  sculptor  for  a  castrato  singer,  a  situation 
possibly  suggested  by  the  memoirs  of  Casanova.  Then 
in  December  comes  an  equally  curious  study  of  unnatu- 
ral love,  A  Passion  in  the  Desert  (une  Passion  dans  le 
desert),  a  subject  to  which  Balzac  recurred  again  in  The 
Girl  with  t)ie  Golden  Eyes  (la  Fille  aux  yeux  d'or,  1834).. 


The  Development  of  Balzac        loi 

The  former  tale  was  originally  intended  to  form  part  of 
a  novel  on  the  French  in  Egypt.  Its  description  of  the 
desert,  "all  and  nothing,  God  without  mankind,"  renders 
superbly  the  moral  oppression  of  solitude,  and  the  little 
tale  as  a  whole  is  a  cameo  that  intensifies  our  regret  that 
it  must  remain  a  fragment.  Of  the  same  month  (Decem- 
ber) is  An  Episode  during  the  Terror  (une  Episode  sous 
la  terreur),  a  philosophic  study  of  the  effect  that  such 
a  death  as  that  of  Louis  XVI.  might  produce  on  the  mind 
of  his  executioner,  and  also  of  the  purification  of  religious 
feeling  by  persecution.  Balzac  had  as  yet  written  nothing 
so  exquisite.  His  sympathies,  here  as  always,  were  with 
throne  and  altar,  for  if  in  The  Two  Dreafus  he  had 
seemed  to  condone  for  a  moment  the  crimes  of  the  Terror 
it  was  only  that  he  might  show  the  admiration  of  talent  for 
unswerving  will  and  the  instinctive  hatred  of  genius  for 
mediocrity. 

During  this  year,  especially  through  the  influence  of  the 
noted  journalist  Girardin,  of  his  wife  Delphine,  and  of  her 
mother  Sophie  Gay,  Balzac  was  extending  his  acquaintance 
among  the  aristocrats  of  Hterature  and  the  young  roman- 
tic royalists  who  united  in  dislike  of  the  bourgeois  king 
and  the  Revolution  of  1830.  In  the  Salon  of  the  Girar- 
dins  Balzac  met  Hugo,  Vigny,  Lamartine,  George  Sand, 
Thiers,  and  other  men  and  women  of  note,  then  or  later, 
and  contributed  with  others  to  the  literary  feast  there. 
With  these  allies  he  ventured  on  journalism,  an  experience 
that  he  put  later  to  excellent  use  in  the  Lost  Illusions, 
Toward  the  close  of  the  year  he  had  won  a  foothold  in  the 
staff  of  the  Revue  de  Paris^  to  which  he  presently  joined 
the  Revue  des  deux  mondeSy  and  by  the  spring  of  1831, 
though  he  relaxed  nothing  in  the  intensity  of  his  labour. 


I02      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

he  felt  justified  in  indulging  his  talent  in  a  little  of  that  love 
of  luxury  that  seemed  to  him  essential  to  the  evoking  of 
his  highest  powers. 

An  important  influence  entered  his  life  during  this  year, 
in  the  form  of  an  anonymous  correspondent  who  proved  to  be 
Madame  de  Castries,  a  complete  aristocrat  and  semi-invalid, 
whose  character  Balzac  has  given  us  without  much  flattery 
in  the  Duchess  of  Langeais.  It  was  through  her  that  he 
came  to  know  that  part  of  the  unreconstructed  aristocracy 
that  remained  faithful  to  the  ideals  of  the  Old  Regime 
more  even  than  to  those  of  the  Restoration,  just  as  the 
intervening  aristocracy  of  the  Napoleonic  period  had  been 
represented  to  him  by  the  Duchess  of  Abrant^s  and 
Madame  Gay.  It  was  at  Madame  de  Castries'  suggestion 
that  he  made  in  the  next  year  (1832)  a  journey  to  Switzer- 
land, which  resulted  in  a  cooling  of  their  relations ;  but 
this  is  to  anticipate,  for  Balzac  did  not  come  to  know 
Madame  de  Castries  personally  till  March,  1832. 

Madame  Gay  and  the  two  duchesses  helped  Balzac 
socially;  the  more  steadfast  Madame  Carraud  exercised 
at  first  a  very  considerable  political  influence  upon  him. 
It  was  at  her  suggestion  that  he  now  began  to  study  social 
politics,  and  even  became  at  the  close  of  1830  a  candidate 
for  the  Assembly.  It  was  with  her  that  he  discussed  by 
preference  and  most  ingenuously  such  books  as  his  Country 
Doctor.  Meantime,  amid  these  varied  influences,  and 
vexed  by  quarrels  with  publishers  whom  he  vexed,  he  was 
pouring  out  a  mass  of  work  that  may  seem  incredible  if 
one  regards  its  quality  and  its  elaboration.  To  accomplish 
this  he  was  obliged  to  deny  himself  to  visitors  and  even 
to  correspondents  for  considerable  intervals,  and  to  re- 
main in  seclusion  for  long  periods.     Of  his  daily  life  the 


The  Development  of  Balzac        103 

correspondence  gives  frequent  hints,  and  his  publisher 
Werdet  supplements  them  with  a  picture  of  his  daily 
life  as  he  saw  it  in  Paris.  "He  usually  went  to  bed 
at  eight  after  a  very  light  dinner,  and  would  almost  always 
be  sitting  at  his  desk  by  two  in  the  morning.  Till  six  his 
quick  lively  pen  (he  always  used  a  quill)  ran  full  speed  over 
the  paper  with  an  electric  sputtering.  ...  At  six  he  entered 
his  bath  for  an  hour.  At  eight  he  took  a  cup  of  coffee 
without  sugar.  Then  I  was  admitted  to  bring  him  proofs 
or  take  away  the  corrected  ones  and  to  get  parcels  of 
manuscript  from  him  if  I  could.  Composition  was  then 
taken  up  with  like  zeal  till  noon,"  when  he  breakfasted 
frugally  and  worked  from  one  to  six.  From  seven  to  eight 
he  would  see  friends,  and  so  he  would  live  for  six  weeks 
or  two  months,  and  then  plunge  into  society  again,  like 
a  bee  among  flowers. 

When  away  from  Paris  he  worked  with  equal  intensity. 
We  hear  of  him  in  1 83 1  at  Nemours,  the  scene  of  Eugenie 
Grandet,  and  with  Madame  Carraud  at  Sache.  He  spent 
the  larger  part  of  1832  here  and  at  Angouleme,  Lyons, 
and  Switzerland,  even  planning  a  journey  to  Italy,  which 
pressing  proof-sheets  compelled  him  to  abandon.  In  1833 
we  find  him  again  at  Angouleme,  and  later  at  Neuchatel, 
where  he  first  met  Madame  Hanska,  who  was  finally  to 
be  his  wife  and  had  been  an  anonymous  correspondent 
since  1829.  Indeed  he  is  constantly  travelling,  again  in 
Switzerland  in  1834,  at  Vienna  in  1835,  in  1838  in  Sardinia, 
and  in  1839  in  Italy  and  Austria. 

We  are  now  in  a  position  to  study  Balzac's  work  with 
such  light  as  the  correspondence  may  throw  upon  it  from 
1 83 1  to  his  quarrel  with  the  Revue  de  Paris  in  1836. 
This  work  begins,  so  far  as  it  concerns  us  here,  with  frag- 


104      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

ments  of  The  Woman  of  Thirty  and  parts  of  TJie  Accursed 
Child  and  of  Droll  Stories,  all  to  be  noted  later.  Then  in 
February  came  The  Recruit  (le  Rt^quisitionnaire) ,  a  sad 
story  of  hope  deferred,  of  agonising  suspense  and  mocking 
despair,  ending  in  heart-broken  death,  very  good  of  its 
romantic  kind,  which  is  still  that  of  The  Elixir  and  Adieu ^ 
while  its  subject  associates  it  with  An  Episode  under  the 
Terror.  This  was  followed  in  May  with  The  Exiles,  where 
the  mysticism  of  Dante  and  of  the  French  philosopher 
Sigier  is  interpenetrated  with  a  wonderfully  vivid  evocation 
of  the  Paris  of  1308  and  its  university  life.  The  story  has 
always  been  "  caviare  to  the  general  "  though  it  is  one  of 
the  strongest  works  of  Balzac  and  one  of  the  most  pro- 
found ;  and  it  is  doubly  interesting  to  the  critic  because 
here  first  we  see  the  gate  ajar  that  he  was  to  open  into  the 
spiritual  world  in  Louis  Lambert  and  in  the  ecstatic  visions 
of  his  wonderful  Seraphita, 

The  Unknown  Masterpiece  (le  Chef-d'oeuvre  inconnu), 
that  followed  in  July  and  was  revised  in  1837  with  the  col- 
laboration of  Gautier,  takes  up  the  psychic  fact  that  Zola  was 
afterward  to  make  the  theme  of  his  Work  (I'OEuvre),  that 
an  artistic  ideal  by  its  very  intensity  of  conception  may 
defeat  its  own  execution.  Thus  this  little  sketch  forms  a 
prelude  to  Gambara,  of  1837,  and  in  a  more  general  way 
to  The  Search  for  the  Absolute,  It  was  indeed  of  minor 
interest,  but  August  gave  to  the  world  two  of  its  psychic 
masterpieces,  The  Red  Inn  (I'Auberge  rouge),  and  I'he 
Wild  Ass^s  Skin  (la  Peau  de  chagrin).  The  former  has  its 
scene  at  Andemach  in  the  days  of  the  first  French  Re- 
public. Its  subject  is  the  psychic  suggestion  of  a  crime 
that  shall  be  imagined  by  one  and  executed  by  another. 
He  in  whose  brain  the  murder  originated  is  convicted  of  it 


The  Development  of  Balzac        105 

and  executed.  Was  he  wholly  innocent  ?  To  the  material 
murderer  the  crime  is  a  source  of  great  wealth.  Was  he 
wholly  guilty?  Had  he  atoned  for  his  guilt  by  a  life-long 
remorse  and  a  mental  degeneration  culminating  in  death? 
Could  one  who  knew  the  truth  honourably  marry  his  daugh- 
ter and  enjoy  his  fortune?  Such  are  the  questions  that 
Balzac  leaves  half  answered  in  this  story,  where  the  execu- 
tion yields  little  if  at  all  to  the  striking  originahty  of  the 
conception. 

The  central  figure  of  The  Red  Inn  reappears  in  The 
Wild  Ass's  Skitiy  which,  as  the  correspondence  informs  us, 
was  written  together  with  the  other,  and  is  the  longest  and 
the  most  remarkable  of  all  the  so-called  "philosophic  tales," 
and  the  one  into  which  the  author  has  put  most  of  his  life's 
philosophy.  Using  the  marvellous,  as  Goethe  had  done 
in  his  Faust  and  Shakspere  in  his  Hamlet^  he  makes  his 
story  the  symbol  of  the  eternal  conflict  of  duty  and  will,  of 
the  ideal  that  dashes  itself  to  fragments  against  the  disen- 
chantments  of  the  material  life.  The  early  struggles  of 
Raphael,  its  hero,  are  partly  autobiographical,  but  presently 
he  comes  in  possession  of  a  bit  of  wild  ass's  skin,  by  which 
all  material  wishes  are  fulfilled,  though  always  at  the  cost  of 
a  fraction  of  life  ;  for  Balzac  believed,  what  his  own  Hfe  illus- 
trated, that  the  spirit  could  grow  rich  only  at  the  body's 
cost  and  that  "  the  sword  would  wear  out  the  scabbard." 
Raphael's  intense  soul  seeks  satisfaction  in  love  and  in  a  fan- 
tastic orgy  of  debauchery  and  wit,  then  makes  a  desperate 
effort  to  prolong  life  by  ceasing  to  will  at  all,  and  perishes 
at  last  in  a  revolt  of  his  animal  nature.  The  conception  is 
most  curiously  profound,  and  the  execution,  though  uneven, 
contains  passages  among  the  best  in  fiction.  To  the  inex- 
haustible subject  Balzac  returned  the  next  year  in  Louis 
LatnberL 


io6      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

But  Balzac's  protean  genius  was  still  to  show  itself  this 
year  in  two  other  forms :  as  a  medieval  mystic,  and  as  a 
medieval  materialist.  Jesus  Christ  in  Flanders  (September, 
1 831)  is  a  brief  piece,  but  it  is  full  of  significance  for  the 
comprehension  of  Balzac  and  of  his  work.  He  himself  so 
conceived  it,  as  we  may  see  from  his  first  letter  to  the 
Duchess  of  Castries,  where  we  find  that  as  early  as  October, 
1 83 1,  he  wishes  all  his  novels  to  be  regarded  as  parts  of  a 
not  yet  fully  elaborated  plan,  and  utters  a  just  warning 
against  any  partial  judgment  of  his  work  or  its  ethical  bear- 
ing. The  general  system  of  his  fiction,  he  writes  to  Baron 
Gerard,  "is  beginning  to  unveil  itself,"  and  he  begins  to 
feel  the  weight  of  an  immense  task  to  be  accomplished, 
"  enough  to  occupy  three  or  four  men."  In  Jesus  Christ 
in  Flanders,  under  the  veil  of  a  Flemish  legend  we  are  to 
see  the  moral  philosophy  of  the  Human  Comedy,  The 
scene  is  a  ferry-boat.  On  it  are  representatives  of  all 
social  classes,  with  a  sober  minded  realist  for  pilot  and  a 
stranger  from  the  spirit  world.  A  tempest  reveals  the 
nature  of  all.  Among  the  wealthy  in  the  stern  are  avarice, 
pride,  worldly  wisdom,  vice,  crime,  scepticism,  and  terror; 
in  the  centre  sits  the  pilot,  himself  his  own  providence, 
opposing  his  strength  of  mind  and  body  to  the  force  of 
nature.  In  the  prow  are  the  little  ones  of  Christ,  the  faith- 
ful and  the  poor,  and  with  them  sits  the  stranger,  and 
gives  to  each  words  of  mystic  comfort.  Borne  up  in  spirit 
they  follow  the  master  from  the  sinking  ship  and  walk  on 
the  waves  to  land.  The  pilot,  sound  at  least  in  head,  is 
washed  alive  to  shore.  The  others  perish,  "  weighed  down 
by  crimes  perhaps,  but  still  more  by  incredulity  and  faith 
in  false  images,  heavy  with  devotion,  light  in  charity,  and 
in  true  religion."     In  a  brief  second  part  comes  the  appli- 


The  Development  of  Balzac        107 

cation  of  the  tale.  "  A  short  time  after  the  revolution  of 
1830  "  the  author  tells  us  that  he  was  weary  of  living,  when 
a  vision  came  to  teach  him  that  Belief  is  Life.  "  I  have 
seen,"  he  says,  "the  burial  of  the  monarchy.  We  must 
defend  the  Church."  And  this  the  Human  Comedy  does 
directly  or  indirectly  in  every  page.  All  that  is  realistic, 
tragic,  sordid  in  life  Balzac  will  show  us  relentlessly,  laying 
bare  society's  spiritual  sores,  like  a  skilful  confessor  of 
souls,  but  behind  Balzac  the  realist  we  shall  see  always  the  \, 
stout  upholder  of  human  self-conquest,  the  believer  in  the 
eternal  power  of  the  unseen,  a  social  philosopher,  if  not 
always  profound,  at  least  always  earnest,  hopeful,  honest, 
purposeful  and  sincere. 

It  is  not  without  its  suggestiveness  that  Jesus  Christ  in 
Flanders  should  be  followed  immediately  in  the  list  of 
Balzac's  fiction  by  Master  Cornelius  (Maitre  Cornelius), 
like  Gobseck  a  study  of  soul-destroying  avarice,  in  which 
the  miser,  finding  that  in  somnambulist  sleep  he  is  robbing 
himself  with  such  diabolical  ingenuity  that  when  awake  he 
cannot  recover  his  treasure,  "succumbs  to  the  horror  of 
the  torture  that  he  has  created  for  himself."  This  Corne- 
lius was  a  friend  of  Louis  XL,  and  plays  a  part  in  the 
Droll  Stories  also.  Artistically,  then,  the  story  affords 
occasion  for  some  fine  descriptions  and  a  portrait  of  the 
favourite  king  of  the  romanticists  that  shows,  what  Catherine 
de'  Medici  was  to  prove,  that  Balzac  had  in  him  the  poten- 
tiality of  a  greater  historical  novelist  than  France  has  yet 
produced. 

But  if  the  work  of  this  year  was  varied,  that  of  1832  was 
so  in  a  far  more  remarkable  degree.  For  in  that  twelve- 
month were  published  four  volumes,  parts  of  two  others, 
and  eight  short  stories  ranging  from  the  depth  of  horror  in 


io8      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

in  The  Great  Bastion  (la  Grand  bret^che),  to  the  philo- 
sophic heights  of  Louis  Lambert^  with  studies  in  the  psy- 
chology of  rage,  of  long  suffering,  and  of  delicate  analysis 
of  "  the  woman  of  thirty,"  sinned  against,  and  sinning, 
abandoned,  and  betrayed.  And  to  set  off  all  this  there  is 
the  graceful  pastel  of  The  Purse  (la  Bourse),  and  the 
Rabelaisian  laughter  of  the  Droll  Stories,  Did  ever  writer 
manifest  himself  in  such  protean  shapes  in  the  space  of 
twelve  months?  We  may  leam  at  least  from  the  works 
of  this  year  the  task  that  awaits  him  who  would  write  a 
general  essay  on  the  works  of  Balzac,  and  may  understand 
the  relative  failure  of  all  who  have  yet  attempted  it. 

Madame  Firfniani  (February,  1832)  is  a  rather  romantic 
little  story  of  love  and  honour  with  something  perhaps  of 
Madame  de  Berny,  in  the  central  figure,  but  the  same 
situation  was  handled  with  far  more  art  and  power  in  The 
Interdict  (I'lnterdiction)  four  years  later.  Then  The  Mes- 
sage (February,  1832)  seeks  to  sound  the  depths  of  tragic 
grief,  and  is  followed  in  March  by  the  pitiful  tale  of  Colonel 
Chaberty  who  returns  from  a  German  military  hospital  like 
a  ghost  to  trouble  joy,  to  find  the  wife  for  whom  he  had 
longed  married  to  another,  and  bent  on  disproving  the 
identity  of  her  first  husband.  In  his  desperate  struggle 
with  the  meshes  of  the  law  the  poor  colonel  wrecks  heart 
and  brain.  So  this  story  is  the  first,  as  it  probably  remains 
the  best,  of  the  group  of  Balzac's  legal  novels,  —  The  Inter- 
dict^ A  Start  in  Life^  The  Marriage  Contract,  and  A 
Mysterious  Case,  —  that  introduce  us  to  the  soul-wearing 
chicanery  of  the  courts.  Chabert  himself,  however,  a 
spectre  from  the  Grand  Army,  is  a  figure  of  the  most  tragic 
grandeur,  and  his  account  of  the  battle  of  Eylau  is  one  of 
the  masterpieces  of  military  fiction. 


The  Development  of  Balzac        109 

Of  the  ten  Droll  Stories  published  in  April,  to  be  fol- 
lowed by  a  second  ten  in  1833  and  a  third  in  1837,  it  may 
be  well  to  speak  here  once  for  all.  They  stand  apart  in  his 
work.  All  are  intended  to  imitate  the  language,  the  man- 
ner, and  in  some  degree  the  spirit  and  the  view  of  life  of 
Rabelais  and  his  Pantagruel.  Balzac  himself  speaks  of 
them  as  his  recreations.  Here  he  found  expression  for  that 
joyous  animal  nature  that  the  seriousness  of  his  task  has 
almost  wholly  suppressed  in  the  Human  Comedy,  If  there 
at  times  he  had  denounced  a  decaying  and  degenerate  civ- 
ilisation based  on  democracy  and  materialism,  and  at  times 
had  let  his  mind  bear  him  into  idyls  of  the  ideal,  into 
pseudo-philosophic  speculations,  or  into  spiritualistic  ecsta- 
sies, here  he  showed  himself  possessed  by  the  jovial  spirits 
of  love,  wine,  and  laughter,  and  so  rounded  out  for  us  the 
complete  circle  of  his  genius,  that  regards  hfe  from  every 
side,  comprehends  alike  the  ascetic  and  the  sensualist,  sym- 
pathises with  all  expressions  of  human  beauty,  the  spiritual 
and  the  sensuous,  and  enjoys  all  expressions  of  human  will, 
the  vulgar  and  the  exalted ;  showing,  too,  with  the  frankness 
of  an  infant,  that  pleasure  which  far  more  men  feel  than  con- 
fess in  mentioning  the  unmentionable,  and  the  laughter  that 
holds  both  its  sides  when  a  jest  is  pointed  at  the  abdomen. 
For  this  reason  it  is  obvious  that  no  detailed  analysis  of  the 
thirty  Droll  Stories  should  be  expected  here.  They  formed 
a  part  of  a  larger  scheme,  of  which  he  announced  twenty  ad- 
ditional tales  as  "in  press"  in  1838,  though  of  these  only 
The  Spinner  (la  Filandi^re)  has  ever  seen  the  light.  They 
therefore  coincide  in  time  with  the  medievalistic  phase  of 
romanticism,  and  are  simply  Balzac's  reflection  of  it.  Yet 
while  the  Droll  Stories  have  thus  many  elements  in  common, 
within  their  hmits  they  show  a  variety  almost  as  great  as 


no      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

the  Comedie  humaine  itself.  We  have  first  in  The  Fair 
Jmperia  an  evocation  of  Constance  in  the  days  of  the  coun- 
cil (1414-1418),  a  phantasmagoria  of  theology,  love,  lust, 
trickery,  and  jollity,  a  picture  of  the  contest  for  facile  favours 
between  the  wealth  and  power  of  age  and  the  simple  pas- 
sion of  youth.  Here  the  future  Lucien,  Esther,  and  Nucin- 
gen  of  Splendours  and  Miseries  of  Courtesans  are  transposed 
as  it  were,  from  the  reaUstic,  modern  tragic  key  to  the 
comic  and  the  medievally  grotesque.  The  Venial  Sin,  that 
follows  is  a  scene  of  private  life,  where  again  the  elements 
of  tragic,  comic,  pathetic,  and  grotesque  are  mingled  with 
romantic  intention,  while  beneath  all  there  is  the  begin- 
ning of  the  psychological  analysis  that  was  to  produce  the 
Woman  of  Thirty  and  the  group  of  studies  co-ordinated 
with  it.  Inferior  in  kind,  though  not  in  execution,  is  The 
King's  Lemanj  a  practical  joke  played  on  a  senile  husband 
for  the  benefit  of  Francis  I.  Again  the  manner  changes, 
and  in  T7ie  Heir  of  the  Devil  we  have  a  bit  of  picaroon 
fiction  with  just  a  dash  of  sorcery,  while  The  Jokes  of  King 
Louis  XI.  is  one  of  the  very  best  pictures  of  that  royal  favour- 
ite of  the  romanticists  since  Scott  had  discovered  him  in 
Quentin  Durward,  Then  in  The  Constable's  Wife  there  is 
the  tragic  irony  of  a  woman  yielding  to  the  solicitation  of 
one  lover,  even  while  another  is  perishing  to  obey  her  sum- 
mons. This  is  followed  by  The  Maid  of  Thilhouze,  a 
rather  commonplace  tale  of  mock  modesty,  and  this  by 
The  Brother  in  Arms,  a  medievalised  Joseph  and  Madam 
Potiphar.  The  first  Ten  is  closed  by  The  Cure  of  Azay- 
le-rideau,  a  good-humoured  pantagruelistic  priest,  such  as 
Balzac  imagined  Rabelais  might  have  been,  and  The  Apos- 
trophe, a  tale  of  feminine  wiles  in  the  manner  of  the  old 
fabliaus.  


The  Development  of  Balzac        1 1 1 

The  second  Ten  opens  with  The  Three  Clerks  of  St 
Nicholas  and  The  Fast  of  Francis  /.,  both  relatively  com- 
monplace. The  Pleasantries  of  the  Nuns  of  Poissy,  also, 
is  a  mere  bit  of  ingenious  and  amusing  scatology,  and  The 
Castle  of  Azay  only  an  amorous  adventure  of  the  daughter 
of  Louis  XI.  told  with  much  verve.  A  far  higher  place 
must  be  accorded,  however,  to  the  tragic  False  Courtesan^  in 
which  there  is  a  diabolical  ingenuity  of  moral  perversion 
breaking  itself  in  vain  against  simple  virtue  that  dies  un- 
stained. From  this  height  we  descend  to  the  smoking- 
room  jest,  very  good  in  its  kind,  on  "  The  Danger  of  Being 
too  Innocent^'  and  the  fatal  adventure  of  The  Dear-bought 
Night  of  Love.  This  is  followed  by  a  supposed  sermon  of 
Rabelais,  a  political  and  satiric  allegory,  and  by  the  longest 
and  most  remarkable  of  the  Droll  Stories ^  The  Succubus^  an 
astonishing  reproduction  of  the  medieval  attitude  of  mind 
toward  the  spirit  world,  and  of  the  legal  procedure  of  127 1. 
The  vision  in  the  third  part  of  this  tale  is  one  of  the  most 
vertiginous  passages  in  Balzac  or  in  any  literature.  Despair 
in  LovCj  with  which  the  second  Ten  closes,  would  have 
pleased  Stendhal  more  than  it  is  likely  to  do  a  modern 
reader.  It  is  a  tale  of  Italian  passion  so  intense  that  it 
changes  coquetry  to  love  by  violence. 

The  third  Ten  is  inferior  to  the  others.  Perseverance  in 
Love^  a  story  of  romantic  devotion,  affords  a  curious  illustra- 
tion of  the  possible  complications  of  medieval  vassalage, 
and  the  tale  of  A  Justice  who  Remembered  Things  is  only  a 
clever  after-dinner  jest.  There  is  more  art,  though  not 
more  verve,  and  much  the  same  spirit  in  The  Monk 
Af?iadorj  who  "  became  a  glorious  abbot "  for  qualities 
hardly  consistent  with  the  monastic  profession.  Of  a 
higher  excellence  is  Bertha  Repentant^  in  which  the  situa- 


112      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

tion  suggests  somewhat  that  of  The  Venial  Sin^  though  both 
the  pathetic,  elegiac  and  the  grotesquely  weird  are  pushed 
to  a  greater  extremity  of  contrast.  None  of  the  succeeding 
pieces  reach  this  height.  The  Fair  Maid  of  Portillon  and 
Fortune  is  always  feminine  are  mere  clever  vulgarities; 
The  Old  Tramp  is  a  bit  of  fantastic  slumming ;  The  Incon- 
gruities of  Three  Pilgrims  is  a  commonplace  story,  and 
Naivete  a  trifle.  The  last  of  the  Stories ^  The  Fair 
Imperia  Married^  alone  rises  to  the  level  of  Bertha,  It  is 
an  elegy  of  passion  that  at  the  close  becomes  so  absorb- 
ingly intense  as  to  find  no  issue  save  in  self-destruction. 
While,  then,  it  is  obvious  that  some  of  the  Droll  Stories 
are,  as  Balzac  calls  them  in  his  correspondence,  the  re- 
creations of  a  tired  brain,  others,  and  especially  The  Sue- 
cubuSf  are  worthy  to  take  a  place  among  the  best  of  the 
Philosophic  Stories  in  the  firmness  of  their  emotional  psy- 
chology, while  at  the  same  time  they  are  stylistically  per- 
haps the  very  finest  work  of  their  author. 

Soon  after  the  first  ten  Droll  Stories  Balzac  published 
three  of  the  original  six  parts  of  The  Woman  of  Thirty  (la 
Femme  de  trente  ans),  begun  in  1831,  finished  in  1834, 
and  rewritten  in  1842  with  an  attempt  at  fusion  of  the 
parts  that  did  not  attain  to  entire  homogeneity.  It  is  most 
suitable  to  speak  of  it  here  because  of  its  close  connection 
with  two  other  stories  of  this  year.  La  Grenadiere  and  The 
Deserted  Wife  (la  Femme  abandonee).  All  three  are 
studies  of  conjugal  infelicity  and  all  teach  in  different  ways 
the  same  stern  truth  that,  given  society  as  it  is,  women 
must  submit  to  social  rule,  even  though  it  stifle  the  most 
imperious  voice  of  the  heart.  The  Woman  of  Thirty^  as 
has  been  said,  is  very  uneven,  it  has  passages  almost  gro- 
tesquely romantic  and  others  of  admirable  realism.    The 


The  Development  of  Balzac        113 

story  opens  brilliantly  with  a  description  of  a  review  in  the 
heyday  of  the  Empire,  minutely  vivid  and  quite  out  of  key 
with  that  part  of  the  narrative  that  tells  how  a  little  girl 
killed  her  half-brother,  and  presently  eloped  with  a  pirate 
while  her  mother  was  enduring  the  petty  miseries  of  con- 
jugal incompatibility,  or  the  dust  and  ashes  of  adultery. 
Morally  the  book  is  stern,  yet  not  unjust  in  its  even-handed 
condemnation  both  of  the  present  social  order  and  of  those 
who  being  in  it  will  not  be  of  it.  But  it  has  less  artistic 
charm  than  The  Abandoned  Wife  (September,  1832)  that 
takes  up  from  another  side  the  psycho-physiological  prob- 
lem of  A  Double  Family  and  asks  how  the  memory  of  years 
passed  in  a  passionate  liaison  will  affect  the  capacity  of  a 
man  for  the  joys  and  duties  of  home,  while  in  La  Grena- 
diere  (October,  1832),  which  Balzac  says  that  he  wrote  in 
a  single  night,  we  have  a  picture  of  child  Ufe  in  Touraine 
that  is  really  exquisite. 

Stronger,  however,  than  any  of  these,  and  perhaps  the 
best  sustained  piece  of  work  that  Balzac  had  yet  done,  was 
The  Cure  of  Tours,  conceived  and  planned,  as  he  tells  us, 
in  ten  days  of  intense  thought.  Here  he  first  essays  to 
expose  the  ecclesiastical  intrigues,  the  occult  influence  of 
which  had  been  felt  throughout  the  reign  of  Charles  X.  and 
had  made  the  Church  at  once  dreaded  and  hated  by  the 
liberals.  This,  then,  is  Balzac's  contribution  to  a  cause 
that  Sue  sought  to  serve  in  his  Wandering  few,  and  Michelet 
in  his  lectures  on  the  Jesuits.  But  Balzac's  attitude  was 
more  generous  and  catholic-spirited  than  theirs.  Abb6 
Birotteau  is  but  one  of  his  series  of  noble  clergymen,  and  it 
is  because  such  priests  as  Troubert  undermine  the  spiritual 
power  of  the  Church  that  they  are  hateful  to  Balzac.  These 
two  abb^s  epitomize  the  French  clergy  under  the  Restora- 

8 


114      ^  Century  of  French  Fiction 

tion  with  the  clearest  vision  and  most  deUcate  touch  that 
have  ever  been  brought  to  the  task,  and  in  his  Sophie  Gam- 
ard  we  find 'also  an  interesting  anticipation  of  Balzac's  later 
reflections  on  The  Old  Maid  (la  Vieille  fille). 

But  if  the  Curate  of  Tours  is  in  its  way  the  best  work 
that  Balzac  had  yet  done,  so,  too,  in  another  way  is  that 
little  masterpiece  of  horror  The  Great  Bastion  (la  Grande 
breteche),  afterward  incorporated  in  Second  Study  of 
Woman  (Autre  6tude  de  femme).  Here  an  injured  hus- 
band with  diabolical  deliberation  has  the  lover  walled  up  in 
a  cabinet,  where  he  knows  that  he  has  taken  refuge,  induc- 
ing the  terrified  wife  to  declare  that  the  closet  is  empty, 
and  leaving  the  guilty  lover  to  reveal  their  common 
disgrace  or  die  a  lingering  death,  a  victim  of  Spanish 
pundonory  of  a  woman's  fears,  and  of  a  vengeance  that  in 
Satanic  ingenuity  of  detail  has  perhaps  no  equal  in  fiction. 
And,  as  though  these  two  were  not  enough  for  a  single 
month,  this  May  produced  also  The  Purse  (la  Bourse),  a 
little  idyl  of  true  love,  radiantly  simple,  and,  though  cer- 
tainly not  great,  remarkable  for  the  entire  contrast  that  it 
shows  to  all  the  other  work  of  this  year. 

Balzac's  next  novel,  Louis  Lamberty  if  we  may  judge 
from  his  correspondence,  preoccupied  him  more  than  any 
of  these.  In  it  he  desired  to  put  both  a  picture  of  his  own 
school-days  and  literary  apprenticeship  and  also  a  sort  of 
introduction  to  his  proposed  treatise  on  the  will.  He  says 
that  he  "  is  in  a  mood  for  work  and  capable  of  marvels," 
that  Lambert  "  will  sell  thousands  of  the  Philosophic 
Stories'^  "  It  is  a  work  in  which  I  have  sought  to  contend 
with  Goethe  and  Byron  ...  a  last  response  to  my  enemies, 
that  should  show  an  incontestable  superiority,"  and  yet 
under  such  pressure  is  he  now  working  that  he  thinks  it 


The  Development  of  Balzac        1 1 5 

"  has  cost  him  dear  "  because  he  has  given  to  it  "  six  weeks 
persistent  work  at  Sach^  and  ten  days  at  Angouleme." 

The  plot  in  Louis  Lambert  is  of  the  slightest.  The  in- 
terest centres  in  the  development  of  a  spiritualistic  theory 
of  thought  by  which  the  will  or  soul  is  supposed  to  transmit 
movement  to  matter.  This  theory  has  in  it  elements  of 
mysticism,  Mesmerism,  and  Swedenborgianism,  and  it  will 
be  well  to  leave  the  analysis  of  these  things  to  those  who 
think  they  understand  them.  Balzac  himself,  writing  in 
January,  1833,  speaks  of  it  as  the  saddest  of  all  abortions, 
and  the  effect  of  his  theory  on  Lambert,  when  coupled  with  a 
passionate  love,  was  to  induce  a  sort  of  philosophic  insanity 
and  an  early  death,  before  which,  however,  he  wrote  five 
letters  to  his  beloved,  in  which  there  is  a  gradation  of  senti- 
ment worthy  of  Stendhal. 

Balzac  closed  this  busy  year  with  The  Marana,  another 
"  philosophic  study  "  but  resembling  Lambert  only  in  that 
name.  Here  he  takes  up  the  parable  of  Hugo's  Lucrezia 
Borgia^  the  redemption  of  the  courtesan  by  maternal  love, 
merging  this  at  the  close  into  a  question  of  family  honour, 
where  a  woman  prefers  to  kill  her  husband  rather  than  to 
suffer  his  criminal  cowardice  and  the  shame  of  his  execu- 
tion. The  elder  Marana  is  one  of  those  queenly  Italian 
courtesans  of  the  renascence,  such  as  Balzac  had  described 
so  superbly  in  The  fair  Imperia  of  the  Droll  Stories^  and 
here  first  we  meet  types  of  the  imperial  soldier  of  fortune, 
always  favourite  characters  with  Balzac  as  with  Stendhal. 
The  whole  story  is  far  more  dramatic  in  treatment  than  is 
usual  with  Balzac,  and  has  been  turned  to  account  several 
times  by  modern  dramatists.  Beside  all  this  varied  pro- 
duction his  correspondence  shows  a  brain  teeming  with 
projects  of  stories  and  novels  that  have  never  been  pub- 


1 1 6      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

lished,  though  some  of  them  seem  to  have  been  completely 
planned  and  partly  written.  And  all  this  time  he  was 
fighting  what  he  calls  the  hydra  of  his  debts,  and  disputing 
his  rights  vigorously  with  publishers.  While  his  mother 
acted  as  a  sort  of  factotum  in  Paris,  interviewing  editors 
making  contracts,  and  settling  or  renewing  his  obligations, 
he  shut  himself  up  in  a  country  solitude,  expecting  to 
turn  off  twenty  pages  a  day  and  to  work  fifteen  or  sixteen 
hours. 

During  the  year  1833,  though  the  number  of  works  pro- 
duced is  less,  the  same  arduous  labour  is  continued.  He 
tells  us  that  he  lives  in  "  an  atmosphere  of  thoughts,  ideas, 
plans,  works,  conceptions,  that  mingle,  bubble,  and  sparkle 
in  my  brain,  enough  to  make  me  crazy.  Yet  nothing 
makes  me  thin,  and  I  am  the  truest  portrait  of  a  monk  that 
ever  was  seen  since  the  last  hour  of  the  convents.  As  for 
the  soul,  though,  I  am  profoundly  sad.  My  work  alone  keeps 
me  up."  His  preoccupation,  from  September  of  1832 
until  June  of  1833,  is  The  Country  Doctor  (le  Medecin 
de  campagne).  He  writes  in  September  that  he  has  fin- 
ished it  by  working  three  days  and  nights.  But  as  usual 
the  correction  took  more  time  than  the  writing,  and  in  the 
next  March  he  complains  that  "  it  has  cost  him  ten  times 
more  work  than  Lambert,'^  though,  he  adds,  "  when  one 
tries  to  attain  the  simple  beauty  of  the  Gospels^  to  surpass 
the  Vicar  of  Wakefield^  and  to  put  the  Imitation  of  Christ 
into  action,  one  must  '  pitch  in '  and  hard."  His  ambition 
is  to  rival  the  popularity  of  Atala,  of  Paul  and  Virginia,  or 
of  Manon  Lescauty  to  write  a  book  that  My  Lady  and  her 
portress  alike  may  read,  that  may  be  sold  by  the  100,000, 
that  shall  seem  inspired  by  the  Bible  and  the  catechism. 
And  the  while  he  is  relaxing  himself  with  the  second  Ten 


The  Development  of  Balzac        117 

of  his  Stories  and  with  the  criminal  novel  Ferragus^  the , 
latter  published  in  March  and  April,  the  former  in  July  and 
The  Doctor  in  September. 

If  we  may  trust  the  letters  to  Madame  Hanska,  Ferragus 
was  produced  by  working  day  and  night  to  satisfy  the  exi- 
gencies of  the  Revue  de  Paris,  which  after  all  disappointed 
his  perhaps  unreasonable  expectations.  But  the  story  had 
"  an  extraordinary  success  "  in  Paris,  then  more  disposed 
than  now  to  such  romantic  extravagances.  For  Ferragus  is 
the  chief  of  "The  Thirteen,"  a  band  of  pale,  mysterious, 
Byronic  desperadoes,  social  Bonapartes  banded  to  plunder 
society  in  imitation  of  the  Laras  and  the  Corsairs.  He  is 
interesting  to  us  now  chiefly  as  a  preliminary  study  for  the 
Jacques  Collin  of  Lost  Illusions  and  Splefidours  and  Miseries 
of  Courtesans,  Like  him  he  is  an  escaped  convict,  and,  as 
Jacques  has  a  model  son,  so  Ferragus  has  a  gentle  daughter, 
wife  of  the  respectable  broker  Desmarets.  In  secret  she 
visits  her  fond  father.  Suspicion  arises  in  the  mind  of  a 
jealous  lover,  and  he  innoculates  the  husband  with  his  own 
moral  disease.  The  Thirteen  mow  a  swath  of  corpses  and 
attain  at  last  the  delator,  who  dies  in  lingering  agony,  but 
not  until  suspicion  has  slain  its  victim,  and  grief  at  her 
death  has  transformed  the  dread  bandit  chief  into  a  harm- 
less imbecile.  The  idea  of  the  power  of  secret  societies 
seems  to  have  been  a  favourite  with  Balzac,  and  the  story 
is  good  of  its  kind,  but  it  is  not  the  kind  that  gives  him  his 
rank  in  the  history  of  fiction.  Except  for  a  wonderful 
passage  on  the  Dies  irce  toward  the  close,  the  whole  might 
almost  as  well  be  from  the  pen  of  Eugene  Sue. 

The  Country  Doctor,  as  may  be  gathered  from  what  has 
already  been  said  of  it,  is  not,  strictly  speaking,  a  novel  at 
all.     The  story  is  but  a  slight  framework  for  a  sort  of  tract 


ii8      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

on  social  and  moral  economy,  abounding  in  exquisite  de- 
scriptions of  scenery  and  such  photographic  reproduction  of 
peasant  modes  of  thought  and  attitudes  of  mind  as  to  seem, 
especially  if  we  regard  it  in  connection  with  The  Village 
Curate  and  The  Peasants^  simply  marvellous  in  one  who 
knew  as  Balzac  did  the  provincial  town  and  the  capital. 
None  should  pass  artistic  or  ethical  judgment  on  the 
Human  Comedy  without  weighing,  beside  the  dramas  of 
Parisian  and  provincial  vice  and  crime,  the  stories  of  Benas- 
sis,  the  doctor,  and  of  Bonnet,  the  curate. 

The  book  recounts  the  experience  of  Genestas,  a  general 
of  Napoleon  and  of  the  Restoration,  who,  before  confiding 
his  somewhat  morbid  ward  to  the  country  doctor,  seeks 
occasion  to  observe,  under  an  assumed  name,  his  life  and 
character.  He  accompanies  him  on  his  rounds  among  the 
people  and  learns  to  know  them  as  they  talk  to  Benassis, 
whose  devotion  to  their  interests  has  transformed  sordidness 
into  prosperity,  by  convincing  them  that  "  intellectual  prog- 
ress was  involved  in  sanitation,"  and  that  there  were  for- 
tunes in  model  farms.  In  this  Balzac  shows  the  effect  on 
his  vigorous  but  conservative  imagination  of  the  teachings 
of  Saint-Simon  and  Fourier,  reinforced  later  in  The  Peas- 
ants by  those  of  Proud hon.  But  if  the  economics,  though 
suggestive,  are  somewhat  inartistically  obtruded,  the  studies 
of  peasant  characters  are  wholly  admirable  and  their  funda- 
mental egoistical  shrewdness  is  reheved  with  a  touch  of 
romantic  idealism  here  in  La  Fosseuse,  as  later  in  Farra- 
beche.  Perhaps  no  one  has  caught  the  nature  of  the 
French  peasant  and  small  villager  as  Balzac  has  done,  that 
small,  narrow,  materialistic  soul,  clinging  to  the  soil  like  a 
mollusc  to  the  rock,  industrious  and  capable  of  great  sacri- 
fice, of  the  earth  and  therefore  sensual,  but  surely  not  so 


The  Development  of  Balzac        1 1 9 

brutally  so  as  Zola  has  painted  him  in  Earth.  Yet  the 
glory  of  The  Country  Doctor  is  not  here,  but  rather  in 
Napoleon,  whose  memory  seems  to  brood  over  these  coun- 
try minds  and  rises  to  an  epic  utterance  in  the  twenty-five 
pages  where  Goguelat,  in  his  own  savoury  language,  tells  us 
what  the  great  Emperor  was  to  the  men  of  that  generation 
who  lived  far  away  from  the  ignoble  strife  of  Parisian  fac- 
tions. No  wonder  that  Madame  d'Abrant^s  wept  over  it, 
as  we  are  told  in  the  correspondence,  for  nothing  in  the 
whole  fifty  volumes  of  the  Human  Comedy  shows  such 
astonishing  power  of  self-projection  and  psychic  vision. 

The  Country  Doctor  was  not  yet  printed  before  the  letters 
show  Balzac's  intense  preoccupation  with  Eugenie  Grandet, 
and  before  this  is  through  the  press  he  has  begun  work 
both  on  Lost  Illusions  and  on  Cesar  Birotteau,  and  is  medi- 
tating Seraphita.  He  now  goes  to  bed  at  six,  rises  at  mid- 
night, and  works  till  noon,  with  proofs  in  the  afternoon. 
"  Poor  pen,"  he  writes,  "  it  must  be  diamond  not  to  wear 
out  under  such  use."  He  has  a  lawsuit  on  his  hands,  also, 
about  The  Country  Doctor,  and  threatens  another  about  the 
as  yet  unpublished  Duchess  of  Langeais.  He  is  deep  in 
journalism  also,  and,  as  though  that  were  not  enough,  he 
has  become  a  partner  in  a  publishing  enterprise.  He  is 
beginning  to  regret  the  abuse  of  coffee,  and  yet,  in  the 
midst  of  all  this,  he  has  advanced  in  the  general  scheme  of 
his  novels  very  near  to  the  final  conception,  for  in  August 
(1833)  he  has  already  co-ordinated  the  groups  of  scenes  of 
Private,  Provincial,  Parisian,  and  Country  Life,  under  the 
title  Studies  of  Manners,  with  the  Philosophic  Studies, 
That  he  did  not  add  in  terms  Military  Studies  and  Political 
Studies  was  only  because  he  had  not  yet  advanced  in  them 
sufficiently  to  warrant  their  inclusion.     All  that  really  re- 


I20      A  Century  of- French  Fiction 

mained  for  the  ultimate  conception  was  the  title,  Human 
Comedy  (Com^die  humaine),  first  used  in  1838  in  a  letter 
to  Madame  Hanska,  and  the  conception  of  social  evolution 
that  underlies  the  latter  part  of  his  work,  as  characters 
reappear  in  diiferent  ages  and  in  their  own  children,  a 
conception  not  grasped  in  all  its  consequences  before 
1842. 

"  Eugenie  Grandet  will  astonish  you,"  writes  Balzac,  with 
no  unjust  pride,  for  it  is  one  of  the  most  remarkable  studies 
of  avarice  in  all  literature,  and  its  heroine  Balzac's  most  ex- 
quisite feminine  creation.  Yet  the  book  was  at  first  re- 
ceived with  critical  incredulity  as  The  Country  Doctor  had 
been  with  sceptical  indifference.  The  action  of  the 
story  is  a  tragic  conflict  between  the  egoism  of  avarice 
and  the  generosity  of  love.  Many  of  its  scenes  have  be- 
come part  and  parcel  of  the  literary  consciousness,  not  of 
France  alone,  but  of  all  well-read  men.  Grandet  in  his 
store-room,  or  mending  his  stair,  or  convicting  Eugenie  of 
romantic  generosity,  or  dying  in  his  strong-room,  these  are 
but  a  few  of  the  imperishable  pictures  that  every  reader  may 
evoke  at  will  from  this  wonderful  stage-setting  and  action  of 
human  comedy.  Just  as  the  serpent's  eye  fascinates  its  vic- 
tim, so  the  glitter  of  gold  drags  Grandet  to  moral  ruin  and  to 
monomania.  "He  would  lie  in  wait,"  says  Balzac,  "watch 
his  prey,  jump  on  it  —  and  then,  opening  the  jaws  of  his 
purse,  he  would  swallow  a  pile  of  ^cus  and  lie  down  tran- 
quilly like  a  serpent  in  his  digestion,  impassive,  cold,  me- 
thodical." But  more  and  more  what  he  possessed  came  to 
possess  him,  until  at  last,  a  paralytic  maniac,  he  clutches  the 
crucifix  to  his  lips  in  death,  not  because  it  is  the  Saviour 
who  is  nailed  there,  but  because  devotion  has  gilded  the 
body  and  the  nails.      As  he  lingers  on  the   threshold  of 


The  Development  of  Balzac        121 

the  unseen  world  he  gasps  to  his  daughter  with  his  last 
breath  the  menace  and  the  warning :  "  You  will  have  to 
give  an  account  to  me  of  all  I  leave  to  you."  Has  literature 
ever  drawn  for  us  a  ruling  passion  stronger  in  death,  or  a 
more  ghastly  travesty  of  the  spiritual  tie  that  binds  the 
living  and  the  departed? 

The  composition  of  such  a  masterpiece  as  this  must  have 
cost  intense  effort,  and  from  it  Balzac  seems  to  have 
sought  relief  in  composing  The  Illustrious  Gaudissart 
(I'lllustre  Gaudissart),  the  story  of  a  commercial  traveller, 
told  with  all  the  gusto  and  vulgarity  to  which  commercial 
travellers  have  accustomed  us,  and  which  we  may  read 
either  in  the  broad  jesting  spirit  in  which  it  was  written, 
or  with  curious  wonder  at  the  insight  it  affords  into  the 
mobility  of  Balzac's  marvellous  genius. 

The  close  of  1833  found  Seraphita  "  much  advanced,'* 
but  he  guarded  jealously  this  loftiest  flight  of  his  genius,  and 
did  not  let  it  go  finally  till  the  close  of  1836.  Indeed  in 
January  of  1834  he  complains  that  he  is  "  dazed  with  ideas 
and  hungry  for  rest."  Seraphita  seems  to  him  "  a  work 
more  cruel  for  the  author  than  any,"  though  "  as  far 
superior  to  Lambert  as  Lambert  is  to  Gaudissart.^^  The 
output  of  this  year  is  therefore  less  in  quantity  than  that 
of  the  preceding.  The  Duchess  of  Langeais  was  finished 
in  January  and  printed  in  March,  part  of  Seraphita  was 
given  to  the  world  in  June,  the  Search  for  the  Absolute  (la 
Recherche  de  I'absolu)  and  further  brief  portions  of  the 
Woman  of  Thirty  followed  in  October,  and  Pere  Goriot^ 
finished  in  September,  closes  the  year  and  in  its  serial 
publication  reaches  into  the  next.  That  is  all  for  1834, 
but  he  had  been  meditating  also  The  Lily  in  the  Valley 
(le  Lys   dans  la  valine),  and   had   been  much   occupied 


122      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

with  new  editions  of  older  work  and  his  usual    financial 
distractions. 

The  Duchess  of  Langeais,  offered  as  the  second  part  of 
the  History  of  the  Thirteen^  is  such  a  novel  as  Balzac  alone 
in  his  generation  could  have  written,  and  as  only  his  genera- 
tion would  have  written  at  all.  The  "Thirteen"  enter  the 
tale  only  to  enable  Montriveau  to  rescue  the  duchess,  or, 
as  it  proves,  her  corpse  from  a  Spanish  cloister,  where  she 
is  the  self-immolated  victim  of  coquetry  transformed  to 
passion.  The  interest  of  the  tale  centres  in  its  picture 
of  the  society  of  the  Faubourg  Saint-Germain  during  the 
Restoration,  and  in  its  analysis  of  intellectual  coquetry, 
that  supreme  product  of  social  artificiality.  The  duchess, 
who  seems  intended  for  Madame  de  Castries,  was  "  a  type 
of  the  nature  of  her  caste,  at  once  superior  and  feeble, 
great  and  petty,  artificially  instructed,  really  ignorant,  full 
of  high  feelings,  but  lacking  a  thought  to  co-ordinate  them. 
Spending  the  richest  treasures  of  her  soul  in  conforming  to 
social  conventions,  ready  to  brave  society,  but  hesitating 
and  becoming  artificial  through  her  scruples,  having  more 
wilfulness  than  character,  more  infatuation  than  enthusiasm, 
more  head  than  heart."  But  the  whole  of  this  long  and 
subtle  description  must  be  read  and  pondered,  and  even 
then  we  shall  not  know  wholly  this  woman,  who  could  toy 
with  love  till  she  killed  it,  and  then  kill  herself  with  ascetic 
macerations  because  her  own  too  tardily  proffered  love  was 
spurned.  This  psychic  dissection  is  admirable,  but  the 
climax  of  the  tale,  the  abduction  and  proposed  branding 
of  the  duchess  by  the  Thirteen,  is  too  much  in  the  spirit 
of  its  time  to  satisfy  ours.  The  last  words  of  the  story 
have  a  biographical  significance.  At  Geneva,  in  January, 
in   the   first   months   of   his   acquaintance   with   Madame 


The  Development  of  Balzac        123 

Hanska,  Balzac  writes :  ' "  It  is  only  the  last  love  of  a 
woman  that  can  satisfy  the  first  love  of  a  man."  )  But  even 
as  early  as  October,  1831,  he  had  written  to  this  Madame  de 
Castries,  "  If  I  should  marry  by  and  by,  it  will  be  with  no 
one  but  a  widow." 

The  Search  for  the  Absolute  is  the  first  of  a  group  of 
stories  written  during  1834  and  1835  that  mark  preoccu- 
pation with  the  hidden  life  of  the  soul,  growing  in  intensity 
through  A  Drama  by  the  Sea-shore  (un  Drame  au  bord 
de  la  mer)  and  Melmoth^s  Reconciliation  (Melmoth  recon- 
cili^)  and  reaching  in  Seraphita  an  almost  ecstatic  climax 
of  Orphic  mysticism.  This  Seaixh  for  the  Absolute  is  a 
strangely  fascinating  story  of  scientific  curiosity  growing 
into  absorption,  and  thence  to  monomania.  Balthazar 
Claes,  in  seeking  for  primordial  matter,  spends  millions, 
ruins  as  far  as  in  him  lies  his  family,  and  dies  with  "  Eureka  !  " 
on  his  lips.  Very  curious  also  is  the  figure  of  the  famulus 
Lemulquinier,  ignorant  and  yet  himself  gradually  caught 
in  the  net  of  science.  But  the  long-suffering  devotion  of 
Madame  Claes,  like  that  of  Chaucer's  Grisildis,  threatens 
to  become  exasperating,  and  his  daughter  Margaret,  though 
apparently  intended  for  a  heroine,  has  inherited  more 
than  was  well  of  the  weaknesses  of  both  her  parents.  The 
persistency  with  which  these  women  ruin  themselves  for 
sentiment,  and  the  iteration  of  the  phrase  "  Margaret  paid 
her  father's  debts,"  are  irritating,  though  they  may  be 
essential  if  the  ultimate  social  immorality  of  scientific 
egoism  is  to  appear  in  all  its  potential  horror.  Here,  how- 
ever, the  family  is  saved  from  the  worst  results  of  Claes'  folly 
by  the  decidedly  romantic  financial  talents  of  Margaret, 
and  our  regard  for  her  filial  affection  that  suffers  her  father 
to  turn  affluence  to  bankruptcy  is  diminished  by  the  easy 


124      ^  Century  of  French  Fiction 

facility  with  which  the  wand  of  her  genius  can  transform 
bankruptcy  to  affluence.  The  critic  will  hardly  agree  with 
the  author,  who  writes  with  fatherly  self-satisfaction  that  this 
novel  is  *'  grandly  constructed."  « 

Like  Shakspere,  Balzac  was  not  backward  in  self- approval, 
and  often  in  his  letters  judged  his  work  more  justly  than  his 
contemporaries.  If  we  cannot  agree  with  his  judgment  on 
the  structure  of  T/ie  Search  for  the  Absolute ^  he  is  probably 
right  when  he  says  a  little  later  that  Pere  Goriot  is  '*  finer 
even  than  Eugenie  Grandety^  though  indeed  it  is  hard  to 
choose  between  two  novels  so  different  and  so  excellent. 
Pere  Goriot  is  Balzac's  King  Lear.  He  has  been  a  success- 
ful manufacturer,  and  has  retired  from  commerce  with 
wealth  that  enables  him  to  procure  for  one  daughter  an 
aristocratic,  for  the  other  a  wealthy  husband.  From  this 
moment  his  life  becomes  an  elegy  of  paternal  sacrifice. 
Like  the  fabled  pelican  he  tears  his  breast  to  feed  his 
children,  who  live  a  heartless  life  of  leeches  and  of  lechery. 
The  father  dies  at  last,  the  impoverished  victim  of  his 
devotion.  This  death-bed  scene  is  among  the  great 
chapters  of  fiction,  and  serves  as  an  object  lesson  on 
the  necessity  of  balancing  altruism  with  egoism  to  a 
certain  Rastignac,  a  type  of  the  self-made  man  of  those 
days  and  the  successful  social  struggler  of  ours.  Given 
the  world  as  it  goes,  worldly  wisdom  speaking  by  Bianchon 
and  cynical  self-will  incarnated  in  Jacques  Collin,  here 
masked  under  the  name  Vautrin,  both  enforce  the  lesson 
that,  however  society  may  be  out  of  joint,  it  will  avenge 
itself  implacably  on  all  who  contravene  its  laws  whether  for 
better  or  for  worse.  Even  the  giant  genius  of  Vautrin, 
after  having  in  other  novels  felt,  once  and  again,  the 
necessity  of  seasoning  even  criminality  with  devotion,  is 


The  Development  of  Balzac        125 

obliged  at  last  to  place  itself  in  the  service  of  society ;  and 
if  Rastignac  climbs  to  wealth,  station,  and  power,  it  is  by 
shrewdly  taking  the  world  as  it  goes.  But  this  is  to  antici- 
pate. The  primary  purpose  of  Pere  Goriot  is  to  show 
senile  devotion  and  hideous  ingratitude,  and  these  have 
seldom  found  stronger  literary  expression. 

In  1835  the  only  long  novel  published  was  Seraphitay 
and  four  short  stories  of  varied  excellence  make  up  the 
work  of  the  year,  during  which  he  began  also  The  Lily  in 
the  Valley  J  over  which  he  says  he  weeps,  and  trusts  others 
will  do  so.  Over-work  is  telling  on  him.  He  complains 
that  the  excessive  labour  of  completing  Seraphita  has  given 
him  such  neuralgia  as  to  compel  him  to  stop  work  alto- 
gether, though  a  few  months  later  the  necessities  of  his 
debts  have  inspired  him  with  the  desperate  scheme  of 
working  twenty-four  hours  at  a  time,  with  one  interval 
of  rest  between,  thus  securing  "twenty-one  and  a  half 
hours  of  work  a  day."  "  Men  talk  of  the  victims  of  wars  and 
epidemics,"  he  writes,  "but  who  considers  the  battle- 
fields of  art,  science,  and  letters,  and  the  dead  and  dying 
that  fierce  struggles  for  success  pile  up  on  them?  "  and  yet 
his  restless  mind  is  thinking  once  more  of  journalism  and 
of  taking  an  active  part  in  politics.  He  is  encouraged, 
too,  by  the  growing  popularity  of  The  Country  Doctor  and 
by  flattering  offers  for  the  right  to  reprint  what  he  calls  his 
"  youthful  literary  garbage."  In  November  he  makes  a 
flying  visit  to  Madame  Hanska  at  Vienna,  and  "  near  that 
dear  being  recovers  all  his  imagination  and  his  verve," 
which  he  employs  on  Seraphita  and  on  The  Memoirs  of 
Two  Young  Wives  (les  M^moires  de  deux  jeunes  marines). 
He  closes  the  year  much  encouraged  with  his  business 
prospects  and  buys  a  country  house,  "  La  Grenadiere." 


126      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

The  publications  of  1835  begin  with  A  Drama  by  the 
Sea-shore  (un  Drame  au  bord  de  la  mer),  which  bears  a 
close  relation  as  a  study  of  remorse  to  The  Red  Inn,  But 
here  the  murder  is  done  by  a  father  on  his  son  to  guard  the 
honour  of  his  family.  The  setting  of  the  story  is  a  very 
effective  scene  on  the  Breton  coast,  that  Balzac  was  to  paint 
so  fondly  in  Beatrix^  and  the  story  is  told  by  a  native 
fisherman  with  a  naked  simplicity  that  recalls  Flaubert. 
Another  but  much  less  satisfactory  story  of  remorse  is 
Mehnoth's  Reconciliation  (Melmoth  r^concili^),  the  idea  for 
which  was  taken  from  the  English  Maturin's  Melmoth 
(1820).  The  horrible  melancholy  that  comes  from  su- 
preme power  in  the  world  of  matter  and  of  thought, 
the  Mephistophelian  joy  in  doing  ill,  is  the  supposed  sub- 
ject, but  our  interest,  save  for  the  well-drawn  figures 
of  the  courtesan  Aquilina  and  of  the  dishonest  cashier 
Castanier,  is  attracted  mainly  by  the  fine  opening  passage 
on  "  the  feudality  of  money  on  which  the  modern  social 
contract  rests,"  "  that  sore  of  our  civilisation  that  since 
1 815  has  replaced  the  principle  of  honour  by  that  of 
wealth." 

Of  The  Girl  with  the  Golden  Eyes  (la  Fille  aux  yeux 
d'or)  one  need  say  only  that,  as  Sarrasine  had  been  a 
study  of  uni-sexual  passion  between  men,  so  here  a  similar 
perversion  draws  the  marchioness  of  Saint-R^al  to  Paquita 
Valdez,  who  falls  at  last  victim  to  a  jealousy  that  may  be 
called  unnatural,  though  both  medicine  and  the  law  know 
many  curious  parallels  that  justify  the  artist ;  for,  as  Balzac 
says,  "  my  plan  obliges  me  to  be  universal."  The  story 
opens  with  observations  on  "the  soul  of  Paris,"  twenty 
pages  summed  up  at  last  in  a  fine  paragraph  where  the 
armorial  bearings  of  the  city  are  made  to  symbolise  its 


The  Development  of  Balzac        127 

nature  in  a  way  that  justifies  to  Balzac  the  title  of  "  seer," 
le  voyant.  The  boudoir  in  this  tale  is  one  of  the  famous 
passages  of  sensuous  description  in  French  literature,  and 
there  is  a  deep  psychological  interest  in  the  analysis  of 
Marsay,  that  spirit  of  mocking  corruption  whose  genius 
permeates  like  yeast  a  large  portion  of  the  scenes  of  the 
Human  Coinedy.  This  natural  son  of  an  English  lord  had 
been  trained  by  one  of  those  priests  '*  cut  out  to  be 
cardinals  in  France,  or  Borgias  under  the  tiara,"  who  "  be- 
lieved neither  in  men  nor  women,  in  God  nor  the  devil." 
This  half-brother  of  the  marchioness,  and  her  rival  in  the 
affections  of  Paquita,  is  one  of  the  first  blagueurs  in  litera- 
ture and  perhaps  still  the  greatest,  though  the  type  was 
more  common  under  the  third  Napoleon  than  under  Louis 
Philippe,  so  that  Balzac's  insistence  on  this  character  seems 
almost  prophetic. 

Of  the  same  month  as  The  Girl  with  the  Golden  Eyes 
yet  so  different  from  it  that  no  one  pen  but  that  of  Balzac 
could  have  drawn  them  from  the  same  ink-bottle,  is  The 
Marriage  Contracty  first  known  as  la  Fleur  des  pois. 
This,  as  Balzac  says,  is  "  one  of  the  great  scenes  of  private 
life,"  in  which  signing  of  the  marriage  contract  reveals  the 
future  of  the  parties  in  a  situation  whose  "  profound 
comedy  can  be  appreciated  only  by  business  men,"  and 
perhaps  no  longer  even  by  them,  for  it  is  based  on  a 
struggle  between  the  modern  and  the  now  obsolete  ideals  of 
the  "  family  notary."  This  was  Balzac's  first  study  of  the 
role  of  the  dowry  in  French  society,  and  of  the  conflict  of 
interests  that  it  tends  to  produce  between  husband  and 
wife.  The  central  figure  is  his  greatest  mother-in-law, 
Madame  Evangelista,  with  her  terrible  "  bride's  breviary," 
to  which  Marsay  furnishes  the  natural  masculine  counter- 


128      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

part  by  his  brilliant  pleas  for  selfish  cynicism  at  the  open- 
ing and  at  the  close. 

But  if  21ie  Girl  with  the  Golden  Eyes  and  The  Contract 
stand  at  opposite  literary  poles,  what  shall  we  say  of 
Seraphita,  that  *'  door  opened  into  the  world  of  the  in- 
visible," save  that  it  seems  of  another  sphere  than  either? 
This  exquisitely  mystic  poem  in  prose  is  the  first  and 
sublimest  product  of  the  author's  spiritual  communion  with 
Madame  Hanska,  a  hymn  as  it  were  to  the  purification  of 
human  passion  by  divine  aspiration,  to  the  angelic  inter- 
penetration  of  sex  symbolised  by  conjugal  love.  The  novel 
may  not  be  intelligible  to  all  in  its  Swedenborgian  rapture, 
but  it  is  the  best  corrective  to  the  grotesque  error  of  those 
who  say  that  the  presiding  genius  of  the  Human  Comedy  is 
the  five-franc  piece.  Balzac's  style  has  never  risen  to  such 
heights  as  here,  is  never  more  serene  than  in  the  ascent 
of  the  spiritual  mount  at  the  opening,  whence  the  eye 
wandered  over  Norway  with  **  serrated  edges  like  granite 
lace,"  seldom  more  eloquent  than  in  the  closing  vision  of 
the  men  of  this  world,  clothed  in  the  gold,  silver,  azure, 
pearls,  and  jewels  that  they  have  torn  from  earth's  bosom 
or  stolen  from  the  sea,  and  for  which  humanity  has  toiled 
so  long  in  sweat  and  blasphemy.  "  What  do  ye  here,  thus 
ranked  and  motionless?"  says  the  thrice  accusing  voice  of 
those  who  have  beheld  the  mystic  vision ;  "  and  with  one 
accord  all  opened  their  robes  and  showed  their  dried 
bodies  eaten  by  worms,  a  corrupt  dust  tortured  by  horrid 
disease."  "You  led  nations  to  death,'*  says  the  accusing 
voice.  "  You  debauched  the  earth.  You  turned  speech 
against  nature,  prostituted  justice.  You  cropped  the  pasture 
and  now  you  kill  the  sheep.  Think  you  to  justify  your- 
selves by  showing  your  sores  ?     I  go  to  warn  my  brothers 


The  Development  of  Balzac        129 

who  can  still  hear  the  Voice,  that  they  may  quench  their 
thirst  at  the  springs  that  you  have  hidden."  It  is  in  the 
light  of  words  like  these  that  we  are  to  look  at  the  corrup- 
tors  and  the  corruption,  at  the  sordidness  and  the  vice  of 
Balzac's  Human  Comedy, 


CHAPTER  VI 

THE   MATURITY   OF   BALZAC 

THE  years  from  1836  to  the  death  of  Monsieur  Hanski 
in  1842  are  a  period  of  arrested  development  in 
Balzac.  They  began  with  pecuniary  embarrassment.  His 
magazine,  The  Chronicle  of  Paris,  suspended,  leaving  him 
under  heavy  obligations,  and  a  lawsuit,  in  which  he  showed 
more  sense  of  justice  than  wisdom,  soon  after  deprived  him 
of  a  steady  source  of  income  and  of  the  sympathy  of  many 
useful  men  in  the  fraternity  of  authorship.  Broken  in 
health,  harrassed  by  anxieties  and  disappointments,  he 
sought  refreshment  in  Touraine  in  June,  and  did  not  return 
to  Paris  till  October,  when  he  found  himself  obliged  to  give 
up  many  of  those  surroundings  to  which  he  looked  for  aid 
to  his  imagination.  Yet  this  seemed  to  push  him  to  new 
effort.  "  I  am  cast  down,  but  not  dismayed,"  he  writes  to 
Madame  Hanska.  He  goes  on  to  say  that  he  has  written 
the  second  part  of  Catherine  de '  Medici  in  a  single  night, 
The  Old  Maid  (la  Vieille  fille)  in  three,  and  that  last,  most 
beautiful  section  of  The  Accursed  Child  (1  'Enfant  maudit) 
"  in  a  few  hours  of  moral  and  physical  agony."  Emenda- 
tions for  new  editions  cost  this  conscientious  artist  "  more 
than  many  volumes."  "  I  must  surpass  myself,  since  buyers 
are  indifferent,  and  I  must  do  it  in  the  midst  of  protested 
notes,  business  annoyances,  cruel  financial  straits,  and  the 
most  utter  solitude,  deprived  of  every  consolation."  "  Think 
of  that  when  you  read  my  work,"  he  bids  her,  and  we,  too, 


The  Maturity  of  Balzac  131 

should  not  be  unmindful  of  it,  though  when  he  speaks  of 
"  the  Augias'  stable  of  my  style  "  he  certainly  betrays  an 
unnecessary  and  morbid  anxiety.  Toward  the  close  of  the 
year,  however,  he  takes  heart,  having  made  a  publishing 
contract  that  relieved  him  of  pressing  debts  by  mortgaging 
work  to  come  and  securing  the  mortgage  by  life  insurance. 

During  this  year  letters  show  us  that  Balzac  was  working 
ovi  Lost  Illusions ^  The  MemoU's  of  Two  Young  Wives ^znA  The 
Cabinet  of  Antiquities,  He  practically  finished  The  Officials 
(les  Employes,  1837),  and  published  also  seven  novels  or 
tales  composed  in  the  main  at  this  time.  The  list  opens 
with  the  charming  little  Atheist's  Mass  (Messe  de  I'ath^e), 
a  second  tribute  of  Balzac  to  the  good  physician,  with  an 
ideal  of  brotherly  love  that  should  bridge  all  gulfs  of  station 
and  of  creed.  The  Auvergnat  water-carrier  who  denies 
himself  his  humble  ambition  that  a  physician  may  not  be 
disappointed  of  his  lofty  one,  the  sceptic  doctor  who  buys 
for  the  soul's  repose  of  his  benefactor  the  masses  for  which 
he  had  longed,  and  himself  devoutly  attends  them,  both 
show  the  touch  of  nature  that  makes  the  world  kin. 

A  somewhat  higher  place,  however,  belongs  to  The  Inter- 
dict (1 'Interdiction,  Jan. -Feb.  1836),  which  exhibits  in 
Madame  d'Espard  perhaps  the  most  dangerous  type  of  a 
society  woman,  a  fashionable  coquette  of  the  Restoration, 
not  vicious,  but  conscienceless,  heartless,  egoistic,  a  woman 
to  whom  magnanimity  at  her  expense  seems  not  only  foolish 
but  criminal.  Her  efforts  to  put  her  husband  under  guar- 
dianship reintroduce  us  to  the  purlieus  of  the  law  and  to 
Balzac's  righteous  judge,  Popinot,  who  would  feel  at  home  in 
the  millennium.  The  whole  story,  though  by  no  means 
without  humour,  is  thoroughly  romantic.  Contrast  is  pushed 
to  the  utmost  verge,  both  between  opposing  characters,  as 


132      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

the  Marquis  and  Marchioness,  and  in  single  individuals,  as 
Pjpinot,  who  is  a  Saint  Vincent  de  Paul  in  the  morning 
and  a  criminal  judge  in  the  afternoon.  And  then  there  is 
a  mysterious  Byronic  brother.  Indeed  all  the  personages 
are  forced.  The  appeal  is  to  the  heart  rather  than  to  the 
head.  It  proceeds  less  from  the  mood  of  The  Marriage 
Contract  than  from  that  of  The  Lily  and  of  Seraphita. 

Facino  Cane  (March,  1836)  also  is  romantic,  a  rather 
insignificant  fancy  of  a  blind  musician  who  had  been  a 
Venetian  prince.  It  is  interesting  chiefly  for  some  inter- 
woven reminiscences  of  Balzac's  early  struggles  for  literary 
recognition.  This  was  followed  in  June  by  the  most  note- 
worthy work  of  the  year,  The  Lily  in  the  Valley  (le  Lys  dans 
la  valine),  a  book  written  avowedly  with  the  thought  of 
Madame  Hanska  ever  present  to  the  author,  and  having  so 
many  admirable  qualities  that  those  to  whom  picturesque 
and  vivid  description  appeals,  as  well  as  those  who  delight 
in  sentiment  a  outrance^  are  apt  to  lose  their  critical  bal- 
ance in  regard  to  it. 

The  Lily  in  the  Valley  has  for  heroine  Madame  de  Mort- 
sauf,  a  sort  of  ideal  romantic  Grisildis,  who  endeavours  to 
combine  the  corporeal  duties  of  unappreciated  wife  and 
mother  with  those  of  *nhe  spouse  of  the  soul"  to  F^lix 
Vandernesse,  who  has  the  incredible  indelicacy  to  narrate 
the  tale  to  another  lady,  in  whom  he  fatuously  hopes  to 
find  **  a  sister  of  charity,"  but  who  gives  him  only  the  good 
advice  to  hunt  up  "  some  Madame  Shandy."  Henriette  de 
Mortsauf,  however,  even  in  her  lifetime,  by  no  means  filled 
Felix's  heart.  He  was  "  the  sport  of  two  irreconcilable 
passions,  of  which  he  felt  the  influence  alternately."  This 
second  flame,  Arabella  Dudley,  shows  Balzac's  idea  of  the 
phase  passion  would   take  in   a   Protestant   environment. 


The  Maturity  of  Balzac  133 

Her  love  is  supremely  sensual,  yet  calculating  and  able  to 
assume  at  any  moment  the  mask  of  hypocritical  indifference. 
The  moral  of  this  story,  which  contains  little  action  and 
much  "  philosophy,"  is  that  love  cannot  live  on  alms,  and 
that  ideal  passion  overreaches  itself.  Henriette,  a  mis- 
understood wife  of  a  hypochondriac  husband,  dies  a  pathetic 
victim  to  her  jealous  purity  and  her  enterprise  against 
common-sense,  while  Arabella  discards  F^lix  as  she  would 
an  old  glove,  and  we  cannot  feel  that  she  lost  much  in  losing 
him. 

It  is  clear  that  in  this  novel  Balzac  intended  a  sort  of 
projection  into  the  ideal  of  his  own  aspirations  and  platonic 
relations  toward  Madame  Hanska,  but  Henriette  is  also  the 
romantic  counterpart  of  the  more  soberly  conceived  Eugenie 
Grandet,  and  her  romanticism  exceeds  at  times  the  patience 
or  the  credulity  of  the  reader.  The  novel  contains,  however, 
in  its  descriptions  of  the  valley  of  the  Indre,  on  which  Bal- 
zac had  dwelt  fondly  also  in  The  Woman  of  Thirty  and  in 
La  GrenadilrCy  the  most  exquisite  pages  of  their  kind  in  all 
his  fiction,  and  the  oriental  exuberance  of  his  account  of 
the  harmonious  chords  of  colour  and  the  vertiginous  gamuts 
of  odour  in  the  famous  bouquets  of  F^lix  seem  like  the  vis- 
ions of  a  hashish  eater.  Altogether,  then,  though  The  Lily 
iti  the  Valley  cannot  be  called  a  great  novel,  it  is  unjust  to 
call  it,  with  Faguet,  "  the  worst  novel  we  know."  No  man 
in  his  generation  but  Balzac  could  have  written  it,  and 
literature  is  the  richer  for  the  bankruptcy  of  F^lix  and 
Henriette  in  their  effort  to  put  asunder  what  God  joined 
together,  and  to  divorce  the  ideal  from  reality,  the  spirit 
from  its  corporeal  symbol. 

Of  The  Accursed  Child  (I'Enfant  maudit),  that  followed 
in  October,  the  larger  part  had  been  written  and  printed  in 


134      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

183 1,  but  was  now  subjected  to  a  revision  that  should,  as 
Balzac  said,  "  bring  the  rest  to  the  height  of  the  concluding 
part  and  make  of  the  whole  a  sort  of  httle  poem  of  melan- 
choly that  should  yield  no  place  to  criticism."  It  retains 
the  sombre  colouring  of  the  tales  of  1830  and  early  part  of 
1831,  which  accorded  also  with  his  present  mood,  and  it 
shows  besides,  like  other  work  of  those  former  years,  the 
typically  romantic  interest  in  the  medieval  past.  Its  tone, 
however,  is  wholly  elegiac,  and  the  sea  is  made  a  weirdly 
dominating  symbol  of  the  life  of  the  hero,  who  seems  hardly 
more  human  than  the  frail  figure  of  his  beloved,  so  delicate, 
so  fragile,  so  sure  to  break  rather  than  bend  before  the 
fierce  will  of  the  battle-scarred  father.  The  exquisiteness 
of  this  story,  especially  of  the  concluding  chapter,  is  almost 
mystic.  One  feels  in  it  the  spirit  breath  of  the  author  of 
Seraphita. 

Another  exhibition  of  versatility  like  that  which  had  asso- 
ciated The  Girl  with  the  Golden  Eyes  to  The,  Marriage 
Contract  binds  in  this  October  The  Accursed  Child  to  The 
Old  Maid  (la  Vieille  fille).  The  Human  Comedy  would 
not  be  complete  without  the  autumn  as  well  as  the  spring 
of  maidenhood,  and  The  Curate  of  Tours  had  been  hardly 
sympathetic  or  just.  Here  in  Mile.  Cormon  we  have  a 
figure  drawn  at  once  with  insight  and  sympathy,  and  placed 
against  a  background  picturing  with  a  Dutch  minuteness 
the  life  of  a  provincial  town  in  lower  Normandy  during  the 
Restoration.  The  story  is  one  of  disillusion  and  sardonic 
humour,  as  might  be  expected  from  the  circumstances  of 
its  composition.  It  is  indeed  a  veritable  "  School  for  Scan- 
dal," thoroughly  realistic,  except  perhaps  for  the  grisette 
Susanne,  in  whom  we  may  see  one  of  the  premonitory 
symptoms  of  2he  Lady  with  the  Camellias  and  except  also 


The  Maturity  of  Balzac  135 

for  Athanase  Granson,  a  suicide  suffering  from  the  malady 
of  the  age,  who,  Hke  Musset  and  Balzac's  own  Albert 
Savarus,  perishes  chiefly  by  his  lack  of  will.  Charming, 
however,  is  the  sympathetic  picture  of  Valois,  a  beau  of 
the  old  regime,  who  cannot  survive  the  abdication  of 
Charles  X.  His  rival,  Bousquier,  the  Napoleonic  liberal, 
is  drawn  with  a  pen  perhaps  less  justly  discriminating,  but 
surely  delightfully  caustic.  One  feels  throughout  this  novel 
that  Balzac  has  passed  into  the  second  stage  of  his  relation 
to  Madame  Hanska,  out  of  the  false  and  strained  idealism 
of  The  Lily  on  toward  the  sober  realities  of  Lost  Illusions 
and  The  Cabinet  of  Antiquities,  to  be  warmed  toward  the 
close  by  the  sun  of  his  love's  complement  reflected  in 
Cousin  Pons.  The  work  of  the  year  was  closed  with  what 
is  now  the  second  part  of  Catherine  de^  Medici,  The  Secret 
of  the  Ruggieri,  written,  as  he  says,  "  in  a  single  night,"  but 
as  the  introduction  to  it,  The  Calvinist  Martyr,  was  not 
printed  till  1841,  both  will  be  more  fitly  spoken  of  under 
that  date. 

The  correspondence  of  1837  is  meagre,  and  the  fiction 
shows  some  falling  off  in  interest.  The  first  part  of  Lost 
Illusions,  published  in  February,  was  in  good  part  composed 
earlier,  and  is  best  discussed,  as  is  its  continuation  in  1839, 
in  connection  with  its  conclusion  in  1843.  This  was  fol- 
lowed in  July  by  The  Officials  (les  Employes),  certainly 
to  us  one  of  the  least  interesting  parts  of  the  Human  Com- 
edy, for  it  is  devoted  in  large  measure  to  an  attack  on  the 
organisation  of  the  French  administrative  departments  and 
on  official  nepotism.  It  is  one  of  the  less  happy  of  Bal- 
zac's frequent  expressions  of  his  disgust  with  the  Orleanist 
monarchy  and  all  its  works  and  ways.  The  central  figure, 
Rabourdin,  is  a  "  little  great  man,"  a  genius  for  civil-service 


136      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

reform,  stifled  by  routine  and  intrigue,  by  pettiness  and 
mediocrity,  while  his  wife,  who  gave  to  the  work  its  original 
title.  The  Superior  Wo77ian^  painfully  portrays  the  frequent 
struggle  of  refinement  and  ambition  to  gain  the  social 
recognition  and  fortune  that  are  necessary  to  their  healthy 
life.  Such  studies  may  be  useful  and  true,  but  they  are 
sure  to  be  tedious,  even  when  treated  with  the  laborious  art 
of  Flaubert  or  the  painstaking  and  keen  analysis  of 
Balzac. 

Gambara^  which  followed  in  August,  is  little  more  than 
an  application  of  The  Hidden  Masterpiece  to  music,  another 
illustration  of  the  cruel  tragedy  that  attends  the  pursuit  of 
the  ideal  in  art.  Here,  however,  the  sombre  tones  are 
relieved  by  a  background  of  comedy  in  Giardini,  the  cook 
"  whose  talents  had  ruined  three  restaurants,"  and  there  is 
intercalated  in  the  story  a  very  penetrating  analysis  of 
Robert  the  Devil.  On  Gambara  followed  the  third  Ten  of 
the  Di-oll  Stories  already  noticed,  and  the  year  closes  with 
Cesar  Birotteau, 

This  novel  is  closely  connected  in  spirit  with  The  Officials 
though  superior  to  it  in  interest.  We  are  taken  here  into  the 
world  of  commerce.  C^sar,  the  brother  of  the  unfortunate 
Curate  of  Tours,  is  a  manufacturing  perfumer,  and  his  wife, 
a  type  of  the  simple,  courageous  helpmeet,  with  a  com- 
mercial instinct  sounder  than  her  husband's  commercial 
reason.  There  are  some  admirable  pages  of  sympathetic 
delineation  of  the  Parisian  bourgeoisie,  commonplace  and 
jealous,  but  good  and  obliging,  dupe  of  its  own  virtues  and 
ridiculed  for  its  faults  by  a  society  unworthy  of  it.  Some 
of  the  minor  figures  are  excellent,  especially  the  smugly 
materialistic  druggist  Matifat  and  the  dishonourably  success- 
ful banker  Tillet.     But  the  story  will  be  best  remembered 


The  Maturity  of  Balzac  137 

for  its  minute  and  perhaps  partly  autobiographic  picture  of 
the  mental  and  moral  tortures  of  commercial  embarrass- 
ment and  bankruptcy.  In  this  novel,  as  in  several  others 
of  this  and  the  following  years,  the  whole  is  by  no  means 
equal  to  the  sum  of  its  parts. 

The  year  1838  was  marked  by  Balzac's  journey  to  Sar- 
dinia on  a  fool's  errand,  seeking  Fortunatus'  purse  in  the 
scoria  of  Roman  mines.  Nothing  was  published  until  Sep- 
tember brought  The  Cabinet  of  Antiquities ^  to  be  followed 
in  October  by  the  first  part  of  the  Splendours  and  Miseries 
of  Courtesans  and  a  conclusion  to  The  Officials.  Then 
November  saw  The  House  of  Nucingen^  and  the  new  year 
found  A  Daughter  of  Eve  in  course  of  publication.  No 
wonder  that  Balzac's  letters  show  his  mind  always  busy  with 
what  he  calls  "  the  moral  campaigns  of  literary  creation," 
"  his  forces  and  faculties  at  tension  night  and  day  to  invent, 
write,  render,  paint,  recollect."  Already  he  conceives  of  his 
work  as  a  co-ordinated  whole  and  uses  for  the  first  time  the 
words  "  Human  Comedy  "  of  "  the  grand  edifice  "  of  these 
"  studies  of  manners."  But  he  feels  worn  out,  and  tells 
Madame  Hanska  in  January  that  he  is  sleeping  fifteen  or 
sixteen  hours  a  day,  "  to  recreate  his  brain,"  which  indeed 
does  not  recover  its  usual  fecundity  till  1841. 

The  fiction  of  these  comparatively  lean  years  opens  with 
The  Cabinet  of  Antiquities  (le  Cabinet  des  antiques) ,  a  sort 
of  continuation  of  The  Old  Maid  (la  Vieille  fille),  in 
which  the  opposition  between  the  old  and  the  new  social 
ideals  is  transferred  from  the  matrimonial  to  the  political 
field.  Bousquier,  the  dubious  hero  of  the  former  novel, 
triumphs  here  in  the  person  of  his  wealthy  but  plebeian 
niece.  Mile.  Duval,  over  the  aristocratic  prejudices  of  Vic- 
turnien  d'Estrignon,  one  of  the  younger  specimens  in  this 


138      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

collection  of  fossils,  where  the  old  marquis  and  his  sister 
represent  with  touching  pathos  those  intransigeant  nobles 
who  neither  learned  nor  forgot,  and  returned  at  the  Restora- 
tion poor  and  out  of  touch  with  the  new  order.  Almost 
equally  typical  and  pathetic  is  their  old  steward,  now  the 
lawyer  Chesnel,  who  ruins  himself  to  save  the  family  honour, 
that  the  thoughtless  prodigahty  of  the  spoiled  child  Vic- 
turnien  has  imperilled.  Thus  the  novel  is  an  examination 
into  the  causes  and  the  stages  of  the  downfall  of  the  old 
families,  and  its  moral  is  summed  up  by  the  somewhat 
giddy  Duchess  of  Montfrigneuse,  who  tells  her  effeminate 
lover :  "  There  is  no  more  nobiUty  .  .  .  there  is  only 
aristocracy.  .  .  .  You  will  be  far  more  noble  when  you  have 
money.  Marry  whom  you  will.  She  will  be  as  much  mar- 
chioness as  I  am  duchess."  Whereon  the  old  marquis 
comments  sadly:  "All  is  lost,  even  honour." 

In  The  House  of  Nucingen  (la  Maison  Nucingen)  we 
leave  the  commercial  side  of  Parisian  life  for  that  of  the 
bankers  and  speculators  who  by  their  legalized  trickery 
have  come  to  take  the  place  in  literature  of  the  Turcarets 
of  a  preceding  century.  The  fateful  results,  political  and 
moral,  of  this  dominance  of  the  money  power  occupy  also 
the  early  part  of  Splendours  and  Miseries  of  Courtesans  (les 
Splendeurs  et  mis^res  des  courtisanes)  written  at  this  time, 
and  indeed  they  reappear  at  nearly  every  later  period  of 
Balzac's  work.  But  for  the  moment  he  turned  from  this  to 
study  in  A  Daughter  of  Eve  (une  Fille  d'five)  "  the  type 
of  a  neglected  wife  between  fifteen  and  twenty."  In  this 
excursion  into  romance  the  colours  are  rather  more  toned 
down  than  in  The  Interdict^  though  Raoul  Nathan,  the  poet, 
dramatist,  critic,  politician,  and  literary  man-of-all-work, 
with  genius  o'erforming  his  rather  ugly  tenement  of  clay,  is 


The  Maturity  of  Balzac  139 

a  conglomeration  of  qualities  rather  than  a  character, 
and  Count  F^lix,  after  having  become  insufferable  as  a 
Grandison,  surprises  us  at  last  by  going  to  a  masked  ball, 
disguised  as  a  woman,  to  flirt  with  his  own  rival.  It  is 
strange  that  Balzac  should  have  fallen  into  such  melodra- 
matic vulgarity  as  this;  but  in  these  years  he  was  begin- 
ning to  feel  the  effect  of  prolonged  platonic  love.  At  first 
the  relation  with  Madame  Hanska  was  as  stimulating  to 
him  as  that  with  Frau  von  Stein  had  been  to  Goethe. 
Gradually,  however,  with  them  both,  this  attempt  to  divorce 
sentiment  from  sense  produced  a  sterilizing  effect,  from 
which  Goethe  recovered  through  the  Italian  journey  and 
Christiane,  and  Balzac  through  the  revival  of  a  normal  rela- 
tion between  him  and  his  beloved  on  the  death  of  Monsieur 
Hanski  in  the  winter  of  1842.  We  may  trace  this  effect  in 
all  the  work  published  in  the  next  four  years. 

During  1839  Balzac  travelled  in  Northern  Italy  and 
went  to  Vienna  to  see  Madame  Hanska  there.  In  the 
preceding  year  he  had  bought  a  little  suburban  estate 
where  he  built  Les  Jardies,  the  country  house  in  which 
Gambetta  met  his  death.  Here  he  passed  most  of  his 
time,  with  brief  visits  to  Paris,  until  in  1843  he  bought 
and  fitted  up  with  much  elegance  a  city  house  in  the 
present  rue  Balzac,  in  still  deferred  hope  of  a  marriage 
with  the  now  widowed  Madame  Hanska,  that  he  was  not 
to  realise  till  a  few  months  before  his  death.  It  was  at 
Les  Jardies  that  most  of  the  literary  work  of  1839  and  the 
following  years  was  done,  and  the  country  life  seems  to 
lend  a  certain  freshness  to  The  Village  Curate,  published 
in  three  parts  from  January  to  August  during  this  year,  as 
well  as  to  the  first  two  parts  of  Beatrix,  which  was  not 
completed  till  1844. 


140      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

In  The  Village  Curale^  as  in  the  Country  Doctor^  we 
have  a  study  of  rural  conditions,  with  many  reflections  on 
politics  and  social  economy,  and  both  books  end  with  the 
death  of  a  benefactor  of  the  countryside.  But  here  the 
point  of  the  story  is  directed  against  the  subdivision  of 
estates,  and  peasant  proprietorship,  introduced  at  the  Revo- 
lution, with  results  that  Balzac  thinks  most  injurious  both 
to  property  and  morals,  to  Church  and  State.  Obvious 
traces  may  be  seen  here  of  the  influence,  if  not  actually  of 
the  hand,  of  Madame  Hanska,  but  of  far  more  real  and 
artistic  interest  are  some  passages  of  truly  exquisite  Li- 
mousin landscape,  and  the  character  of  the  Cur^  Bonnet  is 
a  charming  religious  idyl.  Less  satisfactory  is  the  heroine 
Veronique,  the  accomplice  of  a  murder  committed  for  love 
of  her,  but  in  whom  religion  gradually  overcomes  all 
earthly  sentiments,  until  she  dies  a  victim  to  her  suicidal 
asceticism,  after  having  satisfactorily  demonstrated  to  the 
villagers  the  advantages  of  farming  on  a  large  scale.  This 
death-bed  scene  is  still  famous,  and  in  romantic  days  was 
thought  to  be  highly  edifying,  but  Veronique  is  quite  too 
morbid  to  be  satisfactory.  Her  parents,  in  whom  natural 
acquisitiveness  is  gradually  absorbed  in  parental  love,  are 
however,  admirably  conceived,  as  are  also  some  of  the 
minor  figures. 

Beatrix  has  a  wholly  different  interest  because  of  its 
quite  obvious  portraits  of  George  Sand,  of  the  Countess  of 
Agout,  of  Gustave  Blanche,  and  of  Listz,  who  appear  as 
Camille  Maupin,  Beatrix,  Claude  Vignon,  and  Conti,  but 
the  story  as  a  whole  is  unsatisfactory  and  unhomogeneous. 
It  is  true  that  the  central  character,  Caliste,  is  equally  con- 
temptible as  a  youthful  simpleton  and  as  lover,  husband, 
father,  and   partner   in   a  *' retrospective   adultery"   with 


The  Maturity  of  Balzac  141 

Beatrix ;  true  too  that  his  wife  is  always  the  patient  Grisil- 
dis.     But   the   really   interesting   characters,  Camille   and 
Beatrix,  seem   hardly  consistent  with  themselves,  though 
both  represent  phases  of  sexuality  in  which  the  heart  has 
no  share  and  the  senses  very  little.     In  these,  and  in  the 
thoroughly  admirable  Madame  Schontz  of  the  concluding 
part,  which   belongs   to    the  years  of  revival  in  Balzac's 
genius  after  Monsieur  Hanski's  death  had  loosed  its  wings, 
we  have  Balzac's  contribution  to  the  then  much  agitated 
question  of  the  "  rehabilitation  of  the  courtesan."     He  has 
undertaken   to  show  here   that  the   most  purely   platonic 
feminine  affection,  as  well  as  the  most  egoistically  cerebral 
and  the  most  impudently  venal,  have  each  certain  common 
traits  in  them  of  the  average  woman's  instinct  of  social 
conformity.     The  Beatrix  of  the  second  part  shows  an  un- 
selfish love  struggling  in  the  bonds  of  coquetry;  Camille 
from  her  convent  retreat  confesses  the  folly  of  platonism ; 
and  Madame   Schontz  sacrifices   instantly  a   wealthy  and 
genial  companionship  to  a  provincial  ennui  that  brings  with 
it  a  regular   and   socially  recognisable  union.     *<  On   the 
other  hand,"  says  Balzac,  "  women  restrained  by  education, 
rank,  wealth,  virtue,  are  attracted,  secretly  of  course,  toward 
the  tropical  regions  of  love,   so  that  these  two  feminine 
natures  have  each  back  in  their  hearts,  one  a  little  desire  of 
virtue,  the  other  that  little  curiosity  about  vice.     In  one  it 
is  the  last  reflection  of  the  divine  ray  not  yet  extinguished. 
In  the  other   it  is  the   remnant  of  our   primitive    clay." 
To  illustrate  this  on  its  many  sides  is  the  not  wholly  real- 
ised aim  of  Beatrix,     In  its  style  the  novel  shows  a  labored 
imitation  of  Gautier,  from  whose  Portraits   (1837)   many 
phrases  and  even  sentences  are  incorporated,  though  not 
in  a  way  to  affect  the  originality  of  the  story. 


142     A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

Beatrix  was  succeeded  in  April  by  the  second  part  of 
Lost  Illusions y  and  this  in  August  by  Massimilla  Doni^ 
which,  however,  was  not  finished  till  December.  This  latter 
takes  up  the  conception  of  the  ideal  in  art,  as  it  had  been 
presented  in  The  Hidden  Masterpiece  and  in  Gamba7'a, 
and  applies  it  to  the  passion  of  love.  In  the  noble  Emilio 
and  in  Genovese  the  singer,  passion  annihilates  action. 
They  are  cured  only  by  being  trapped  into  the  realisation 
of  their  desires  by  the  worldly  wisdom  of  a  French  doctor, 
before  whose  penetrating  eyes  the  poetic  ideals  of  old 
Venice  flit  to  their  limbo  and  leave  behind  four  happy  but 
quite  unethereal  lovers.  The  little  tale  contains  a  fine 
critical  appreciation  of  Rossini's  "  Moise"  and  closes  with  a 
bit  of  cynical  irony  worthy  of  the  Droll  Sto7'ies.  Especial 
interest  attaches  to  this  story,  for  it  is  the  nearest  approach 
made  by  the  author  to  the  manner  of  Stendhal :  almost  no 
action,  analysis  by  self-dissection  in  conversation,  and  a 
psychology  so  minute  as  to  become  almost  painful.  But  the 
novel  cannot  be  ranked  among  the  more  successful  of 
Balzac. 

Not  altogether  unlike  this  in  its  ethical  bearing  is  the 
contemporaneous  Secret  of  the  Princess  of  Cadignan^  which 
is  really  a  sort  of  paraphrase  of  La  Bruyere's  remark  that 
women  "  forget  everything  about  their  past  lovers,  even  the 
favours  that  they  have  bestowed  on  them."  Here  this 
princess  with  a  most  varied  past  makes  herself  pass  for  a 
virgin  martyr  in  the  eyes  of  her  poet-lover,  Arthez,  and 
possibly  in  her  own  also,  so  absorbed  is  she  in  the  un- 
quenched  thirst  of  her  present  emotion.  That  little  scene 
of  human  comedy  is  one  of  the  most  perfectly  constructed 
in  fiction,  but  the  rest  of  the  story  is  of  very  minor  interest, 
though  surely  not  so  trivial  as  Pierre  Grassou,  a  tale  of 


The  Maturity  of  Balzac  143 

successful  artist  mediocrity,  written  in  this  year  and  pub- 
lished in  the  next,  as  was  also  A  Prince  of  Bohemia,  con- 
sisting of  some  ill-natured  satire  on  Sainte-Beuve,  and  the 
rather  tedious  retailing  of  the  caf6  gossip  of  a  certain 
Lherminier  at  the  Divan  le  Peletier,  reproducing  thus  the 
conditions  of  Diderot's  James  the  Fatalisty  though  quite 
without  its  verve  and  interest. 

There  is  promise  of  better  things,  however,  in  Pierrettey 
Z,  Marc  as,  and  The  Provincial  Muse  (la  Muse  du  d^- 
partement),  and  the  fine  Second  Study  of  Wo?nan  (Autre 
etude  de  femme)  was  written  chiefly  in  this  year  also. 
Pierrette  has  the  same  political  bearing  as  The  Cabinet  of 
Antiquities,  but  the  shadow  of  this  sombre  period  is  upon  it, 
and  it  is  one  of  the  most  gloomily  sordid  of  all  the  scenes 
of  the  Human  Comedy.  A  sweet,  simple  child,  killed  with 
refined  cruelty,  moral  and  physical,  by  the  base  calculations 
of  scheming  relatives,  "  none  of  whom,"  as  we  are  assured  at 
the  close,  "  ever  had  the  least  remorse,"  is  the  central  figure, 
and  the  miscarriage  of  justice  is  so  grotesquely  horrible  as 
to  justify  the  conclusion  that  "  law  would  be  a  fine  thing 
for  social  scoundrelism  if  there  were  no  God."  But  though 
all  this  is  very  painful,  the  novel  contains  a  curious  study  of 
the  "  cryptogamous  existences  "  of  petty  tradesmen,  and  in 
Vinet  a  good  type  of  the  demagogues  that  were  brought  to 
the  surface  in  the  scum  of  the  political  boiling  of  1830. 
Nowhere  do  Balzac's  prejudices  against  the  money-grub- 
bing bourgeoisie  of  the  Orleanist  monarchy  find  a  more 
caustic  expression  than  in  this  lawyer  journalist  and  in  his 
Parisian  fellow,  Finot,  in  the  second  part  of  Lost  Illusions, 
with  which  Pierrette  coincides  in  composition. 

Pierrette  was  followed  by  portions  of  the  Petty  Miseries  of 
Conjugal  Life,  perhaps  the  most  insignificant  volume  of  all 


144     -^  Century  of  French  Fiction 

the  Human  Cofnedyj  and  this  in  July  by  Z.  Marcas,  the 
author's  bitterest  accusation  against  the  bourgeois  monarchy 
for  its  suppression  of  the  storm  and  stress  of  youth. 
Marcas  is  the  young  Balzac,  as  he  thought  he  was  or  might 
have  been,  a  titanic,  but  misunderstood  political  genius, 
who  needed  only  opportunity  to  move  the  world,  but  who 
has  fallen  victim  of  the  money  power,  and  is  crushed  by 
the  ingratitude  of  the  government  he  had  served.  No- 
where does  Balzac  distil  such  concentrated  contempt  for 
mediocracy  with  such  mordant  bitterness  as  here,  and  it  is 
curious  to  find  also  in  Z.  Marcas  a  prophecy  of  the  second 
and  of  the  third  republics. 

The  two  stories  of  minor  importance  already  mentioned, 
A  Prince  of  Bohemia  and  Pierre  Grassou^  with  part  of 
Second  Study  of  Woman  and  of  The  Provincial  Muse,  com- 
plete the  work  of  this  year,  but  in  January,  1841,  A  Myste- 
rious Affair  (une  T^n^breuse  affaire)  is  ready  for  the 
press,  and  something  of  his  old  fecundity  enables  him  to 
produce  the  first  part  of  Bachelor  Housekeeping  in  Febru- 
ary, the  conclusion  of  Catherine  de'  Medeci  in  March,  addi- 
tions to  the  Village  Curate  in  May,  Ursule  Mirouet  in 
August,  The  Memoirs  of  Two  Young  Wives  in  November, 
and  The  False  Mistress  in  December.  The  correspondence 
for  these  years  is  scanty  and  somewhat  pathetic.  In  1840 
he  writes  to  Madame  Carraud  that  he  is  willing  to  make  a 
marriage  for  money,  if  only  the  girl  be  "witty  and  ambi- 
tious," for  he  is  "  exhausted  physically  and  morally,"  still 
overwhelmed  by  the  necessity  of  rapid  production  to  meet 
advances  from  publishers  and  journals,  too  deep  in  debt  to 
present  himself  as  candidate  for  the  Academy,  and  even 
breaking  at  last  with  the  Society  of  Literary  Men  that  he 
had  himself  done  much  to  found. 


The  Maturity  of  Balzac  145 

A  Mysterious  Affair  (une  T^n^breuse  affaire)  has  the 
merits  of  The  Chouans  in  a  more  developed  and  chastened 
form,  but  also  the  defect  of  that  work,  an  intrigue  that  is  so 
complex  as  perpetually  to  escape  all  but  the  most  attentive 
readers.  The  secret  police  furnish  here  also  the  mainspring 
of  the  story,  and  here  as  there  history  is  interwoven  with 
fiction.  Our  interest,  however,  is  less  in  this  than  in  the 
keen  analysis  of  the  various  types  of  politician  through 
whom  Napoleon  was  constrained  to  govern,  but  whom  he 
could  never  quite  make  up  his  mind  to  trust.  Had  he  but 
confided  in  Talleyrand,  Mass^na,  and  Fouch^,  says  the  nov- 
elist politician,  "  there  would  have  been  no  more  a  Europe, 
but  a  vast  French  empire." 

Into  the  details  of  this  story  it  is  impossible  to  enter 
briefly,  and  hardly  necessary  to  our  purpose  to  enter  at  all. 
The  date  is  1804.  The  central  figure,  Malin  de  Gondre- 
ville,  is  a  trimmer,  a  miniature  Talleyrand.  His  steward 
Michu  is  an  intransigeant  royalist,  masquerading  as  a  jaco- 
bin the  better  to  serve  the  interests  of  his  exiled  masters. 
The  heroine  Laurence  is  just  Scott's  Diana  Vernon,  a 
fanatic  and  fantastic  royalist,  who  tricks  the  secret  police 
until  their  vengeance  draws  down  the  catastrophe.  Michu 
perishes  and  his  masters  are  saved  only  by  the  intercession 
of  Laurence  with  the  Emperor  she  has  scorned.  This  inter- 
view on  the  eve  of  Jena  is  the  crowning  episode  of  the 
whole  book,  which  certainly  deserves  more  attention  than  is 
usually  accorded  to  it. 

7 he  Calvinist  Martyr^  the  first  and  last- written  part  of 
Catherine  de'  Medici ^  is  also  the  best,  but  the  whole  is  in- 
teresting for  its  minute  archaeological  reproduction  both  of 
buildings  and  of  manners,  and  also  for  its  analysis  of  the 
complex  nature   and   poHcy   of  Catherine,    whom   Balzac 

10 


146      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

seems  to  have  been  one  of  the  first  to  begin  to  apprehend. 
Excellent,  too,  are  the  portraits  of  Francis  II.  and  of 
Charles  IX.,  of  Queen  Mary  of  Scotland,  and  of  Calvin. 
Less  interesting  is  the  extended  study  of  the  Rosicrucian 
Ruggieri,  but  the  novel,  as  a  whole,  is  sufficient  to  show 
that  Balzac  might  have  been  as  easily  the  first  historical 
novelist  of  France  as  he  is  first  in  other  fields  of  fiction. 

Ursule  Mirouet  may  be  regarded  as  a  sort  of  atonement 
for  Pierrette,  Here  the  simple  and  innocent  girl  triumphs 
over  selfish  and  cynical  schemers,  but  not  without  the  inter- 
vention of  spiritualistic  visions  and  unaccountable  conver- 
sions that  give  the  work  a  place  quite  apart.  Perhaps  no 
story  of  Balzac  is  so  uneven.  The  plot  is  far  too  involved, 
and  the  machinations  of  the  expectant  heirs  grow  weari- 
some. On  the  other  hand.  Dr.  Minoret,  "  an  atheist  after 
the  fashion  of  Rousseau's  Wolmar "  is  almost  always  de- 
lightful, and  the  priest  Chaperon  is  one  of  the  best  and 
wisest  clerics  in  all  the  Human  Comedy,  while  the  holy  in- 
nocence of  Ursule  sheds  its  fragrance  over  all,  and  makes 
her  girlish  love  a  true  refreshment  for  the  soul. 

The  Memoirs  of  Two  Young  IVives  (les  Memoires  de  deux 
jeunes  marines),  to  which  Gautier  contributed  two  poems, 
is  Balzac's  first  novel  in  letters,  and  attempts  with  much 
penetration  and  pathos  to  place  thus  in  constant  and  effec- 
tive contrast  phases  of  the  marriage  of  reason  and  conven- 
ience over  against  that  of  romantic  love  and  passion.  The 
letters  of  the  young  mother,  Renee,  recount  some  of  the 
most  charming  scenes  of  private  life  in  all  literature,  while 
the  twice  married  Louise  loses  first  her  husband  and  then 
herself,  both  victims  of  the  excess  of  their  passion.  The 
moral  of  this  novel  is  that  which  Balzac  selected  for  The 
False  Mistress  (la  Fausse  maitresse),  printed  at  the  same 


The  Maturity  of  Balzac  147 

time,  that  "  friendship  is  richer  than  love,  for  it  knows  not 
the  bankruptcies  of  sentiment  and  the  failures  of  pleasure. 
After  giving  more  than  it  has,  love  (such  as  that  of  Louise) 
ends  by  giving  less  than  it  receives."  In  The  False  Mis- 
tress^ however,  the  situation  is  wholly  different.  The  hero, 
Paz,  is  a  trusted  Joseph  in  Potiphar's  household.  He  can- 
not leave  his  Potiphar,  for  he  is  necessary  to  the  administra- 
tion of  his  affairs.  He  loves  Madame,  and  Madame  loves 
him.  But  neither  the  coldness  nor  the  faithlessness  of  this 
Potiphar  can  shake  Joseph's  fidelity,  to  which  he  sacrifices 
his  reputation,  and  even  the  appearance  of  honour.  This 
ultra-romantic  tale  deserves  notice  for  the  sureness  and 
rapidity  of  its  movement,  and  for  the  ingenious  refinement 
of  the  trials  to  which  the  soul  of  Paz  is  subjected,  but  it  is 
not  a  novel  that  lays  hold  on  life. 

Somewhat  of  the  discouragement  of  the  preceding  years 
continues  in  1842.  In  April  he  is  thinking  of  abandoning 
literature  altogether,  and  a  reflection  of  this  state  of  mind 
appears  in  Aldert  Savarus,  published  in  May.  This  story 
has  been  often  highly  praised  for  its  tragic  force  and  for  its 
plot,  unduly  so  perhaps,  for  the  intrigue  depends  on  an  im- 
probable combination  of  accident  and  baseness,  and  the 
close  is  more  fit  to  provoke  moral  revolt  than  tragic  fear. 
Albert  is  the  male  counterpart  of  Camille  in  Beatrix, 
Himself  an  ambitious  servant  of  love,  he  falls  a  victim  to 
ruthless  coquetry,  to  a  truly  romantic  desire  of  self-utter- 
ance, that  led  him  to  write  transparently  autobiographical 
fiction,  and  to  a  pardonable  lack  of  caution  that  led  him 
not  to  post  his  love-letters  himself,  as  Balzac  later  anxiously 
exhorts  Madame  Hanska  to  do.  And  these  are  by  no 
means  all  the  obviously  weak  points  in  a  story  that  in  spite 
of  good  pages  is  one  of  the  least  satisfactory  in  all  the 


148      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

Human  Comedy.  It  is  morbid,  and  so  was  Balzac  when  he 
wrote  it. 

Unsatisfactory  also  is  A  Start  in  Life  (un  D^but  dans  la 
vie)  that  followed  Albert  Savarus  in  July.  This  is  a  sketch 
of  commonplace  Parisian  and  provincial  bourgeoisie,  in  its 
way  as  minute  as  Flaubert's  Madame  Bovary^  with  more 
sordid  realism,  but  with  less  psychological  interest  and 
practically  no  plot.  The  novel  is  largely  in  conversation, 
and  such  interest  as  it  has  is  in  the  exhibition  of  types  of 
bourgeois  character.  First  there  is  Cardot,  of  the  genera- 
tion of  1795,  as  sensual  as  the  Hulot  of  Cousin  Betty ^  but 
shrewd  where  Hulot  had  been  senile,  a  character  not  uncom- 
mon among  the  admirers  of  Jefferson  two  generations  ago  in 
America.  Then  there  is  Moreau  to  represent  the  rising 
into  the  bourgeoisie  of  a  lower  social  stratum,  and  Madame 
Clapart,  who  spoils  her  son's  career  by  unwise  social  ambi- 
tions. Others  figure  for  us  the  romantic  dandy  and  the 
typical  middle-class  man  "  in  search  of  a  social  position." 
So,  though  A  Start  in  Life  is  not  interesting  as  a  story,  it 
has  value  as  a  social  study,  and  the  half-dozen  pages  on  the 
character  of  Cardot,  with  his  gradual  discovery  of  what 
love  costs  old  men,  a  preliminary  sketch  for  the  second 
part  of  the  Splendours  and  Miseries  of  Courtesans,  to  follow 
in  1843,  will  be  remembered  and  treasured  by  all  judicious 
readers. 

Passing  over  a  small  portion  of  The  Reverse  of  Contem- 
porary History  (I'Envers  de  I'histoire  contemporaine), 
printed  in  September,  we  come  in  October,  1842,  to  one 
of  the  great  dates  in  Balzac's  life,  the  first  publication 
of  the  Human  Comedy  under  that  title,  and  with  a  pref- 
ace in  which  he  states  the  co-ordinating  principles  that 
make  him  an  evolutionist,  and  his  work  unique,  in  fiction. 


The  Maturity  of  Balzac  149 

This  may  justly  be  deferred  till  the  examination  of  the 
novels  shall  be  completed.  We  pass,  therefore,  to  Novem- 
ber and  to  Seco72d  Study  of  Woinan  and  the  finished 
Bachelor  Housekeeping.  The  former  is  indeed  less  a  novel 
than  a  conversation  between  some  choice  spirits  at  a  soiree 
at  Madame  d'Espard's,  one  of  the  "  high-fliers "  of  the 
Human  Comedy,  The  talk  turns  on  the  position  of  women 
in  modern  society,  and  on  the  distinction  between  fidelity 
and  constancy.  Three  little  tales  set  off  the  discussion. 
Of  these  The  Great  Bastion^  taken  for  the  purpose  from  its 
original  place  in  The  Message,  is  the  most  famous,  but  that 
other  story  of  the  long-suffering  captain  who  on  the  retreat 
from  Moscow  burns  alive  the  faithless  wife  with  her  lover 
is  a  precious  contribution  to  the  "  shiver  in  literature  "  and 
merits  the  remark  of  Marsay  that  "  nothing  is  more  terrible 
than  sheepish  rage." 

Nothing  can  give  us  a  more  striking  idea  of  the  versatility  of 
Balzac's  genius  than  that  he  should  be  able  to  turn  from  such 
aristocratic  company  as  that  of  the  Second  Study  to  the  relent- 
less sordidness  of  Bachelor  Housekeeping  (la  Rabouilleuse, 
or  un  Menage  de  gargon),  one  of  the  most  vigorously 
drawn,  intense,  and  fearful  scenes  of  the  Human  Coffiedy. 
Here  vice  displays  all  its  naked  horror  in  the  senile  sensu- 
ality of  the  vulgar  and  timid  voluptuary  and  imbecile, 
Rouget,  in  the  soulless  bestiality  of  Flore,  in  the  fierce, 
Satanic  selfishness  of  Philippe  Bridau,  and  the  atrocious 
egoism  of  Maxence,  both  types  of  the  officer  of  the  Empire 
out  of  service.  Against  these,  Philippe's  mother  and  his 
brother  Joseph,  a  study  of  the  artist  Delacroix,  seem  pitifully 
helpless  and  defencelessly  childlike.  It  is  curious  to  note, 
however,  that  parts  of  this  story  are  very  far  beneath  its 
average,  and  the  pranks  of  the  youth  of  Issudun  are  inex- 


150      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

plicably  silly.  It  is  hard  to  resist  the  suspicion  that  Balzac 
was  spinning  copy  here,  as  he  had  already  done  occasion- 
ally, and  certainly  did  during  the  first  half  of  1843  i^  Honor- 
ine  and  The  Provincial  Muse  (la  Muse  du  departement). 

In  the  winter  of  184 2-1 843  Monsieur  Hanski  had  died 
and  Madame  Hanska,  whom  he  had  loved  from  afar  for 
ten  years,  was  now  free,  though  bound  to  Russia  by  the 
interests  of  her  children  and  of  her  estates.  In  August 
Balzac  visited  her  at  Saint  Petersburg,  and  for  the  early 
part  of  the  year  he  was  restless  in  anticipation  of  this  crisis, 
and  working  very  unevenly.  "  I  recognise,"  he  writes,  "  the 
infinite  depth  of  my  passion  by  the  immensity  of  the  void 
that  there  is  in  my  soul.  Love  for  me  is  life,  and  to-day  I 
feel  it  more  than  ever."  In  January,  while  in  this  state 
of  mind,  he  wrote,  and  in  March  he  published,  Honorine, 
whose  object,  like  that  of  The  Two  Young  Wives,  is  to  repre- 
sent the  bankruptcy  of  romantic  marriage,  and  incidentally 
to  discuss  the  social  rehabilitation  of  the  penitent  adulteress, 
"  a  very  rare  and  most  monstrous  exception,"  we  are  told, 
who  dies  in  the  endeavour  to  make  her  gratitude  simulate 
love. 

By  June  he  had  practically  completed  another  study  of 
adultery  from  a  slightly  different  angle.  The  Provincial 
Muse  (la  Muse  du  departement).  This  is  the  story  of 
Dinah  de  la  Boudraye,  a  woman  who,  after  some  years 
of  unsympathetic  marriage  and  of  unquestioned  pre- 
eminence in  literature  and  wit  in  her  provincial  town, 
finds  herself  unable  to  resist  the  seductions  of  the  witty 
and  blase  Parisian  journalist,  Lousteau.  The  first  three- 
fifths  of  the  novel  are  occupied  with  this  provincial 
scene.  Then  the  stage  shifts  to  Paris,  whither  Dinah 
follows   Lousteau,  and  we  have  by  far   the  strongest  part 


The  Maturity  of  Balzac  151 

of  the  story,  a  description  of  the  petty  miseries  of  adultery 
and  of  Bohemian  journaHsm,  that  etches  its  moral  with  an 
acid  as  cutting  as  that  of  Mada?ne  Bovary,  Admirably 
conceived  is  the  cynical,  dwarfish  husband,  who  manages 
to  turn  his  wife's  fault  to  his  own  selfish  ends  and  is  in  no 
haste  to  interrupt  a  relation  that  brings  its  own  lingering 
punishment ;  "  for  in  nature,"  says  Balzac,  "  these  extreme 
situations  do  not  end  as  in  books,  by  skilfully  managed 
catastrophes;  they  end  much  less  poetically,  by  disgust, 
by  blighting  all  the  flowers  of  the  soul."  In  his  more 
romantic  period,  in  The  Woman  of  Thirty,  in  La  Grena- 
diere,  in  The  Deserted  Wife,  and  elsewhere  Balzac  had 
shown  the  romance,  the  pathos,  the  tragedy  of  adultery. 
Here  with  a  clearer  realistic  vision  of  life  he  was  to  show 
its  petty  vileness,  and  to  preach  from  another  text  the 
same  lesson  of  submission  to  social  conventions  and  con- 
servatism. There  is  more  tragic  fear  in  the  momentary 
lapse  of  Dinah  at  the  very  close  than  in  the  tragic  death 
of  those  earlier  heroines,  though  the  novel  taken  as  a  whole 
is  almost  as  uneven  in  execution  as  Ursule  Mirouet,  much 
more  so  than  Bachelor  Housekeeping,  and  more  than  the 
fragments  of  the  Splendours  and  Miseries  of  Courtesans^ 
printed  in  May  and  July,  or  than  Lost  Illusions,  whose  pub- 
lication, begun  seven  years  before,  was  completed  during 
the  appearance  of  The  Provincial  Muse. 

Lost  Illusions  (les  Illusions  perdues),  begun  in  1837 
and  finished  in  1843,  is  the  longest  novel  of  Balzac  and 
one  of  the  most  interesting.  The  "  lost  illusions  "  are  those 
of  David  Sechard,  a  printer  at  Angouleme,  and  of  his  brother- 
in-law  Lucien  de  Rubempr^,  a  sport  of  fortune  and  finally 
a  tool  of  the  arch-knave  Jacques  Collin  at  Paris.  The 
schemes  and  misfortunes  of  the  inventor  David   were   in 


152     A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

part  suggested  by  Balzac's  own  commercial  experiences 
and  are  well  told,  though  quite  inferior  in  interest  to  the 
brilliant  career  and  disgrace  of  the  fair  but  weak-willed 
I.ucien,  a  poet  with  aspirations  to  virtue  and  tendencies 
to  vice.  In  this  connection  Balzac  has  found  opportunity 
for  another  exposure  of  the  scandals  of  French  journalism, 
so  true  that  even  to-day  it  has  not  ceased  to  burn  and 
smart.  The  French  newspaper  office  was  then  what  it 
often  is  now,  "  a  shop  where  are  kept  on  sale  words  of 
any  colour  to  suit  the  public."  It  was  this  that  gave  the 
Illusions  its  immediate  and  sensational  success.  Now,  by 
the  number  of  its  characters  and  their  ramifications  through 
almost  all  the  Parisian  scenes  and  many  of  the  others,  it 
has  become  one  of  the  principal  radiating  points  for  all 
studies  of  the  psychology  of  the  Huffian  Comedy^  and 
an  essential  prelude  to  The  Splendours  and  Miseries  of 
Courtesans^  the  greatest  triumph  of  Balzac's  genius. 

During  Balzac's  absence  in  Russia  there  had  appeared 
a  fragment  of  The  Reverse  of  Conte?nporary  History 
(I'Envers  de  I'histoire  contemporaine),  to  be  continued  in 
the  next  year  and  completed  in  1847.  He  returned  more 
in  love  than  ever  with  Madame  Hanska,  but  it  was  not  till 
1846  that  he  could  obtain  any  promise  of  marriage  from 
her,  and  four  years  more  before  he  could  obtain  its  per- 
formance. One  would  not  be  unjust  to  the  woman  whom 
Balzac  loved  so  long  and  faithfully,  nor  repeat  the  scanda- 
lous insinuation  of  the  GoncoMxX.'i,^  Journal  (viii.  48  j^.), 
but  it  is  impossible  not  to  see  from  his  correspondence 
that  this  uncertainty  lamed  his  mind  and  perhaps  injured 
his  health.  Madame  Hanska  had  agreed  to  meet  him  in 
1844.  She  did  not,  perhaps  she  could  not,  keep  her 
promise,  but  he  complains  that  her  vacillation  has  made 


The  Maturity  of  Balzac  153 

him  lose  valuable  time  and  business  opportunities.  Even 
when  she  went  to  Dresden  in  1845  she  held  him  off  and 
again  interrupted  his  writing.  In  the  winter  of  1845-6 
he  joined  her  on  the  way  to  Italy,  returning  in  January 
to  go  back  to  Rome  in  March,  thus  earning  for  himself 
from  Madame  de  Girardin  the  name  vetturino  per  amorey 
the  "coachman  for  love."  A  little  later  at  Strasburg 
she  pledged  herself  to  him,  and  he  visited  her  again 
at  Wiesbaden  during  that  year.  Such  a  life  was  not 
favourable  to  literary  production,  and  though  love  inspired 
ambition,  we  can  see  from  his  letters  that  his  health 
was  not  bearing  the  strain.  In  February,  1844,  he  com- 
pares himself  to  Napoleon  who  "lived  on  the  blood  of 
Europe,"  while  "  I  shall  have  borne  a  complete  society  in 
my  brain."  Soon  he  will  have  finished  painting  "  Paris,  that 
great  modern  monster,  under  all  its  faces."  He  under- 
takes to  work  "  with  a  fury  more  than  French,  Balzacian," 
and  thinks,  poor  man,  that  he  sees  the  end  of  his  financial 
troubles.  Yet  he  tells  Madame  Hanska  that  without  her 
love  he  would  write  no  more  nor  care  for  the  world.  He 
reminds  her  how  they  have  read  his  proofs  together,  how 
she  has  helped  him  in  the  composition  of  Modeste  Mignon 
and  The  Peasants  (les  Paysans),  as  she  had  done  also 
perhaps,  at  least  by  suggestion,  for  The  Lily  in  the  Valley, 
It  is  she  who  gives  the  title  to  Cousin  Pons ;  and  yet  he 
feels  and  tells  her  that  she  "  has  no  idea  of  what  she  is  to 
him  "  or  she  would  not  paralyse  his  mind  by  caprice  and 
suspense.  And  now  let  us  consider  the  work  of  these  years 
of  hope  deferred. 

In  1844  Balzac  printed  parts  of  the  still  incomplete 
Reverse  of  Contemporary  Histo7y,  of  The  Splendours  and 
Miseries  of  Courtesans^  of  The  Peasants^  and  of  The  Uncon- 


154     ^  Century  of  French  Fiction 

scwus  Comedians  (les  Comediens  sans  le  savoir).  He 
also  practically  completed  the  manuscript  of  The  Lower 
Middle-class  (les  Petits  bourgeois),  which  was  not  printed 
till  four  years  after  his  death.  Beside  these  there  is  the 
rather  insignificant  Gaudissart  11.^  an  amusing  description 
of  the  skill  of  a  Parisian  salesman  in  adapting  himself 
to  a  customer's  character  and  in  selling  him  what  he  does 
not  want,  the  concluding  part  of  Beatrix  (un  Adultere 
r^trospectif) ,  and  the  complete  Modeste  MigJion.  This  last, 
written  as  it  was  printed,  from  May  to  July,  shows  the  new 
hope,  before  its  deferring  had  made  his  heart  sick.  It  is 
the  most  charming  of  the  scenes  of  private  life,  being  to 
Pere  Goriot  what  As  you  like  it  is  to  Lear,  The  satire 
here  is  lighter,  the  humour  more  playful  than  in  any  of  the 
preceding  scenes  of  private  life,  for  Madame  Hanska  had 
smiled  on  it,  and  it  was  but  justice  that  it  should  be  dedi- 
cated to  her.  The  subject  is  still  that  of  The  Two  Youvg 
Wives,  the  question  whether  romantic  love  is  the  best 
guarantee  of  married  happiness,  but  the  lesson  is  taught 
here  with  an  unwonted  smile.  Modeste's  "  cerebral  love," 
that  "worst  vice  of  the  French  woman"  in  Balzac's  eyes,  is 
directed  here  to  poetic  genius  and  nursed  by  wide  reading. 
She  loves  for  his  aspiring  verses,  Canalis,  a  "  sacristan  Dorat," 
whom  she  has  never  seen.  In  reality  he  is  a  Chateaubriand, 
with  a  little  mixture  of  Lamartine,  a  blase,  dry  nature, 
poetic  only  in  its  literary  expression.  Opposed  to  Canalis 
is  Ernest,  "  an  ordinary  man,  of  positive  virtues  and  safe 
morality,  the  sort  that  pleases  parents,"  and  toward  the 
close  an  aristocratic  suitor  comes  on  the  scene  in  the 
person  of  the  amiable  Duke  of  Herouville,  the  feeble  scion 
of  a  decaying  stock.  Among  these  Modeste  chooses,  aided 
by  the  counsel  of  her  father,  the  admirable  Colonel  Mignon, 


The  Maturity  of  Balzac  155 

and  by  the  unselfish  love  of  the  hunchback  Bustcha.  The 
novel  has  faults ;  the  close  is  a  variation,  rather  too  long, 
on  the  old  theme  of  a  lover's  ardour  cooled  by  false  news 
of  poverty;  and  the  resort  to  lying  both  by  Modeste  and 
Bustcha  forfeits  them  somewhat  of  Anglo-Saxon  sympathy ; 
but  the  girlish  shrewdness  of  the  heroine  is  quite  delight- 
ful and  the  literary  satire  will  be  enjoyed  by  all  who  know 
Chateaubriand  and  have  discovered,  what  his  own  wife 
always  knew,  that  he  is  not  to  be  taken  seriously.  Lamar- 
tine  too  was  a  poseur ^  who  liked  to  be  pictured  '*  with  hair 
floating  in  the  wind  and  David's  harp  leaning  against  his 
redingote,"  and  Balzac  put  just  enough  of  him  in  his 
Canalis  to  make  the  purpose  clear.  No  doubt  there  is 
something  of  Madame  R^camier  in  the  Duchess  of  Chau- 
lieu,  who,  however,  plays  but  a  slight  part ;  and  in  Ernest, 
determined  to  be  "  the  dupe  of  no  one  and  of  nothing," 
Balzac  probably  intended  a  little  compliment  to  Stendhal. 
It  is  pleasant  to  find  these  scenes  of  private  life  after  so 
many  storms  ending  in  such  smiling  sanity  and  peace. 

The  Lower  Middle-class  (les  Petits  bourgeois),  on  the 
other  hand,  carries  us  back  to  the  environment  of  Cesar 
BirotteaUy  but  here  we  have  the  retired  bourgeois  with 
political  ambition  exploited  by  a  heartless  intrigue  of  a 
social  struggle,  Theodore  de  la  Peyrade  for  the  hand  of 
Celeste  Colleville,  in  which  he  is  thwarted  by  the  hidden 
hand  of  Vautrin's  rival  Corentin,  while  the  girl  is  suffered  to 
be  happy  with  the  man  of  her  choice.  Professor  Felix  Phel- 
lion.  The  novel  has  suffered  undue  neglect  from  the  uncer- 
tainty as  to  the  part  in  it  of  Charles  Rabou,  under  whose 
care  it  was  posthumously  published,  with  The  Peasants  and 
The  Deputy  of  Arcis  (le  D^put^  d'Arcis),  the  latter  with 
an  avowed  conclusion  by  this  Uterary  executor.     But  besides 


156     A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

admirable  types  of  the  bourgeoisie,  that  **  vital  force  of  our 
corrupt  society,"  with  its  acquisitive  and  administrative  in- 
stincts exhibited  in  Brigitte  Thullier,  its  old-time  integrity 
in  Phellion,  and  its  baser  side  in  that  modern  Tartuffe,  La 
Peyrade,  we  find  here  a  somewhat  pale  reflection  of  the  de- 
tective romance  that  was  to  reach  its  height  in  the  Splen- 
dours. Corentin  reappears  here  as  an  impossible  chief  of 
police,  employing  public  agents  and  funds  in  furtherance  of 
private  schemes,  and  selecting  as  his  successor  a  man  whose 
unfitness  for  any  office  of  trust  would  be  obvious  to  a  child. 
Balzac  rises,  in  this  character,  but  little  above  the  level 
of  Ponson  du  Terrail's  Racombole,  but  in  Cdrizet  he  has 
drawn  an  admirable  figure  of  the  petty  usurer,  and  sev- 
eral of  the  poor  victims  of  his  favours  leave  ineffacable  im- 
pressions on  the  imagination  of  the  reader.  While,  then, 
The  Lower  Middle-class  is  by  no  means  to  be  unreservedly 
commended,  it  is  by  no  means  to  be  neglected  by  any  who 
are  interested  in  observing  the  range  of  Balzac's  genius. 

The  first  part  of  The  Peasants  (les  Paysans)  appeared 
also  during  this  December,  1844,  and  was  all  that  was 
printed  during  Balzac's  life.  It  lays  bare  with  sternest  real- 
ism the  vices  of  peasant  character.  His  references  to  this 
novel  in  the  correspondence  are  constant,  and  he  seems  to 
have  found  it  mentally  impossible  to  concentrate  his  mind 
on  it  for  long  intervals  of  time,  which  shows  plainly  enough 
that  his  brain  was  calling  for  more  repose  than  Madame 
Hanska,  his  creditors,  and  his  publishers  were  giving  him. 
*'  Is  it  written,"  he  writes,  "  that  to  the  end  I  shall  be  tor- 
mented like  a  school  fag?  " 

Balzac's  central  interest  here  is  the  result  on  land  tenure 
and  on  agriculture  of  the  revolutions  of  1789  and  of  1830. 
He  wishes  to  show  how  the  land-hunger  of  the  peasant, 


The  Maturity  of  Balzac  157 

which  from  a  slave  of  the  soil  has  made  him  its  master,  has 
wrought  the  moral  and  economic  injury  of  the  nation,  while 
the  financial  gain  has  fallen,  not  to  the  cultivators,  but  to 
their  bourgeois  exploiters  in  what  Balzac  calls  the  reign  of 
mediocracy.  The  scene  is  laid  in  Burgundy,  where  he 
thinks  the  ideas  of  the  Jacquerie  have  taken  firmest  root. 
Montcornet,  a  general  of  the  empire,  is  endeavouring  to  gov- 
ern his  large  estate  with  generous  firmness.  His  wife  is  an 
angel  of  sentimental  charity.  They  inspire  in  the  peasants, 
however,  only  hatred  and  contempt.  The  shrewd  vicious- 
ness  and  malicious  bestiality  of  the  innkeeper  Tonsard,  the 
poacher  Bonnebault,  the  vagabond  boy  Mouche,  and  best  of 
all  his  aged  preceptor  in  vice,  Fourchon,  suggest  even  in  de- 
tails Zola's  Earthy  to  which  he  Peasants  is,  however,  far 
superior  in  breadth  of  vision.  Shrewd  as  the  peasants 
are,  they  become  the  victims  and  the  tools  of  the  new 
bourgeoisie,  represented  here  by  the  unjust  steward, 
Gaubertin,  and  by  the  admirable  figure  of  the  country 
usurer,  Rigou,  "the  alpha  and  omega  of  democracy,  deep 
as  a  monk,  silent  as  a  studious  Benedictine,  shrewd  as 
a  priest,  tricky  like  all  misers,  always  within  the  law. 
In  other  times  he  might  have  been  a  Tiberius,  a  Riche- 
lieu, or  a  Fouch^,  but  he  was  wise  enough  in  his  day 
to  be  an  unpretentious  Lucullus  and  a  miserly  voluptuary." 
With  diabolical  patience  these  men  undermine  the  posi- 
tion of  Montcornet  and  of  all  that  aid  him,  the  saintly  Abb^ 
Brossetete,  "a  pariah  on  whom  they  spy  like  a  common 
enemy,"  and  the  soldierly  guard,  Michaud,  whose  mur- 
der they  do  not  scruple  to  procure.  So  at  last  they  acquire 
what  the  peasants  have  won  for  them,  and  these  last  are 
more  helpless  than  ever  in  the  clutch  of  a  quasi-hereditary 
bureaucracy  and  of  usury.     It  is  a  gloomy  outlook,  and  the 


158      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

author  seems  to  find,  at  the  close,  consolation  only  in  the 
anticipated  hour  of  the  fruition  of  his  love,  implied  in  the 
marriage  of  the  widow  of  Montcornet  with  Blondet,  the  lit- 
erary spectator  of  the  drama. 

At  the  opening  of  1845.  we  find  these  melancholy  lines  in 
a  letter  to  Madame  Carraud  :  "  Pity  me ;  I  work  sixteen 
hours  a  day,  I  still  owe  more  than  100,000  francs,  and  I 
am  forty-five."  Too  much  of  these  sixteen  hours,  how- 
ever, was  spent  in  writing  to  Madame  Hanska,  for  except 
for  fragments  of  the  Petty  Miseries  this  year  added  to  the 
Human  Comedy ,  only  a  trifle  in  the  style  of  Gaudissart  II., 
A  Man  of  Business  (un  Homme  d'affaires),  which  is  a 
clever  tale  of  a  clever  business  trick,  and  the  concluding 
parts  of  The  Unconscious  Co?nedians  (les  Com^diens  sans 
le  savoir),  which  was  a  mere  device  to  report  on  the  posi- 
tion in  1845  of  various  persons  who  had  figured  in  the 
Human  Comedy  in  former  years.  This,  however,  was  not 
printed  till  April  of  1846,  and  that  year  produced  only  parts 
or  fragments  of  the  truly  petty  Petty  Miseries ^  of  The  Reverse 
of  Contemporary  History^  and  of  those  novels  in  which 
Balzac  was  to  gather  up  all  that  was  most  brilliant  in  his 
genius,  the  Splendours  and  Miseries  of  Courtesans  and  The 
Poor  Relatives,  The  latter  was  the  first  to  be  finished. 
Cousin  Betty  (la  Cousine  Bette)  in  December  of  this  year, 
Cousin  Pons  and  The  Splendours  and  Miseries  in  May,  1847. 
In  December  of  that  year  Balzac  seems  to  have  done  his  last 
work  for  the  Human  Comedy  in  completing  The  Reverse  of 
Contemporary  History,  though  he  may  have  written  further 
on  The  Deputy  of  Arc  is,  of  which  he  had  printed  a  part  in 
May,  1847,  and  which  he  left  unfinished. 

This  fragment,  as  its  name  implies,  is  a  study  of  the 
French    electoral    machinery  and    its    practical   workings 


The  Maturity  of  Balzac  159 

under  the  Orleanist  monarchy,  with  which,  as  we  know, 
Balzac  had  never  been  in  sympathy.  It  is  probable  that  of 
the  two  volumes  under  this  title  Balzac  wrote  only  The  Elec- 
tion, about  half  of  the  first,  and  that  the  three  concluding 
parts  are  the  sole  creation  of  Charles  Rabou,  who  suggests 
his  model  by  occasional  imitation  and  frequent  unconscious 
parody.  It  is  hardly  just  to  Balzac  to  base  any  criticism 
on  this  novel.  If  it  affords  a  just  picture  of  the  nominating 
machinery  of  the  period,  this  would  seem  to  have  been 
clumsy,  inefficient,  and  more  subject  to  feminine  influence 
than  one  would  have  supposed.  Some  of  the  scenes  are 
vividly  drawn,  but  there  are  very  few  of  those  master  touches 
that  had  marked  the  preceding  work  of  this  year.  It  is  as 
though  his  brain  had  not  recovered  from  the  strain  of  pro- 
ducing Cousin  Pons  when  he  set  to  work  on  The  Deputy, 
But  the  correspondence  throws  no  light  on  the  matter. 
It  shows  him  only  wrestling  with  the  remnant  of  his 
debts,  of  which  it  seems  that  he  kept  no  systematic  ac- 
counts, and  emerging  from  these  to  enter  on  railway  specu- 
lation and  on  a  fantastic  scheme  for  transporting  lumber 
from  Russia  to  France.  That  elasticity  of  mind  and  easy 
flow  of  genius  of  which  Balzac  speaks  so  exultingly  to 
Madame  Hanska  in  June  of  1846  was  gone  forever,  but  it 
had  sufficed  to  give  us  four  great  novels,  running  through 
almost  the  whole  scale  of  Balzac's  genius,  like  the  brilliant 
finale  of  the  spectacle  before  the  curtain  falls. 

First,  The  Sple^idours  and  Miseiies  of  Courtesans^  begun 
in  1838,  continued  in  1843,  in  1844,  and  in  1846,  com- 
pleted at  last  in  December  of  that  year,  and  printed  in  May, 
1847.  The  interest  throughout  this  long  novel  centres 
always  in  Jacques  Collin,  alias  Vautrin,  who  had  played  a 
large  part  also  in  F^re  Goriot  and  in  Lost  Illusions,     This 


i6o     A  Century  of  French   Fiction 

man  is  the  somewhat  enigmatic  incarnation  of  personal  will 
pushed  to  the  negation  of  all  social  obligations.  His  tools 
are  the  weak  and  fascinating  Lucien  de  Rubempr^  and  the 
courtesan  Esther  Gobseck,  another  of  those  virgins  of 
the  heart  so  frequent  since  Marion  de  Lorme.  Through 
Lucien,  Jacques  Collin  hopes  to  gain  social  recognition  for 
his  creature  if  not  for  himself,  and  through  Esther  he  hopes 
to  gain  the  means  for  it.  Nucingen  the  banker  is  the 
intended  victim.  There  are  plots  and  counter-plots,  and 
the  intense  suspense  of  the  intrigue  is  ended  at  last  only  by 
the  suicide  of  the  heart-sick  Esther.  Thus  far  the  novel  of 
1 83 8-1 844.  In  the  continuation  of  1846  we  are  told  of 
the  titanic  struggle  of  Vautrin  with  the  law,  and  of  the 
truce  between  them  by  which  the  ex-convict  becomes  chief 
of  police,  when  the  suicide  of  Rubempr^  has  taken  from  him 
the  motive  for  his  self-assertion.  No  novel  of  crime,  in  that 
lower  kind,  has  ever  surpassed  this,  but  the  Splendours  and 
Miseries  is  much  more  than  a  criminal  novel.  Besides  the 
battle  of  Vautrin  and  his  band  against  the  wiles  of  the 
shrewd  detectives  set  on  their  track  by  Nucingen,  is 
the  touching  though  somewhat  romantic  struggle  of  Esther 
for  purity  of  soul,  and  there  are  some  firmly  drawn  types  of 
the  aristocracy,  and  an  admirable  picture  of  the  courts,  their 
personnel  and  procedure  under  the  Restoration.  The  novel 
lacks  the  realistic  intensity  oi  Eugenie  Grande t,  o{  Bachelor 
Housekeepings  or  of  Cousin  Betty,  but  as  a  romance  and  a 
novel  of  plot  it  is  easily  first  in  the  Human  Comedy, 

In  June,  1846,  Balzac  writes  that  the  conclusion  of 
Splendours  and  Miseries  will  give  him  the  first  money  that 
will  be  really  his,  and  will  found  his  fortune.  "  The  moment 
demands,"  he  continues,  "  that  I  write  two  or  three  master- 
pieces ...  that   shall   prove   that  I  am  younger,  fresher, 


The  Maturity  of  Balzac  i6i 

more  fruitful  than  ever."  In  Pons^  he  says,  he  will  paint 
"  the  poor  relative,  overwhelmed  with  humiliations,  insults, 
full  of  heart,  pardoning  all,  and  avenging  himself  only  by  his 
benefits.  Cousin  Betty  is  to  show' the  poor  relative  over- 
whelmed by  humiliations  and  insults,  living  in  the  intimacy 
of  three  or  four  families,  and  meditating  there  the  ven- 
geance of  her  injured  self-esteem  and  her  wounded  vanity." 
The  subject  fascinated  him.  In  July  he  writes  :  *'  I  leave 
you  to  return  to  my  Old  Musician  (Pons).  I  am  well. 
My  head  is  full  of  ideas.  I  work  easily."  He  assures 
Madame  Hanska  repeatedly  of  the  satisfaction  that  he  has 
in  it,  greater  even  than  in  the  great  success  of  the  Splen- 
doitrs  and  Miseries.  It  is  "  a  work  of  excessive  simplicity 
that  contains  all  the  human  heart ;  "  but  Cousin  Betty  is  to 
be  "  a  terrible  novel,"  and  the  thought  of  visiting  Madame 
Hanska  at  its  conclusion  "  gives  his  work  an  impulse  such 
as  he  had  never  known." 

This  latter  was  the  first  printed  of  the  two  and  had  a 
sensational  success,  which  indeed  it  deserved,  for  it  showed 
Balzac's  genius  brightest  at  its  setting,  a  guiding  star  for 
the  whole  naturalistic  movement  of  the  next  generation. 
Cousin  Betty  is  the  most  implacably  naturalistic  of  all  the 
scenes  of  the  Human  Comedy.  In  none  do  the  characters 
brand  themselves  so  indelibly  on  the  mind  as  here  those  of 
Betty  and  Madame  Marneffe,  of  Crevel  and  of  Hulot,  unless 
it  be  in  Cousin  Pons  the  figures  of  Pons  and  Schmucke,  of 
Cibot  and  Remonencq.  These  stories,  written  in  anticipa- 
tion of  his  marriage,  with  mind  almost  free  from  financial 
anxieties,  show  his  mental  powers  in  their  highest  develop- 
ment, even  while  his  physique  was  giving  way  under  the 
tremendous  strain  to  which  for  fifteen  years  he  had  sub- 
jected it. 


1 62      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

It  is  not  possible  here  to  do  more  than  suggest  the  kind 
of  strength  that  these  novels  exhibit.  In  the  former  we  are 
shown  the  jealous  intriguing  poor  relative,  an  old  maid  as 
acrid  and  more  perverse  than  the  tormentor  of  Abb6 
Birotteau.  Her  cousin  Hulot,  an  old  general  of  the  Empire, 
is  now  the  victim  of  a  senile  erethism,  described  with  a 
horrible  minuteness  that  has  been  attempted  but  not  at- 
tained in  Zola's  Nana,  These  two  compass  the  wretched- 
ness and  almost  the  moral  ruin  of  Madame  Hulot,  and  just 
fail  in  attaining  the  same  end  with  her  daughter  Hortense, 
two  figures  of  less  interest.  But  the  strongest  characters  in 
the  book  are  Madame  Marneffe  and  Crevel,  the  former  a 
Becky  Sharp  in  her  second  or  third  incarnation,  a  demi- 
mondaine,  or  *^  demi-cas/or,"  who  has  a  dreamy  look,  a 
candid  face,  and  a  strong-box  for  a  heart ;  the  latter  the 
best  type  in  literature  of  the  materialistic,  libertine,  wealthy 
bourgeois  of  the  reign  of  Louis  Philippe.  Interesting,  too, 
are  the  courtesans,  the  wandering  black  sheep  of  society, 
Josepha  and  Jenny  Cadine,  in  a  numerous  company,  with 
Madame  Nourisson  for  their  worthy  shepherdess.  The  hun- 
dreds, possibly  thousands  of  volumes  that  have  since  been 
written  on  the  various  aspects  of  venal  love  have  hardly 
widened  or  deepened  Balzac's  analysis  of  this  painful  but 
ever-present  subject,  and  as  a  sombre  study  of  human  base- 
ness Cousin  Betty  awaits  its  equal  in  fiction. 

Cousin  Fonsy  on  the  other  hand,  considers  the  poor  rela- 
tive in  the  light  of  a  "  nigh  related  guest"  that  outstays  his 
welcome  while,  and  is  made  to  quiver  in  all  his  sensitive 
nature  at  his  irksomeness.  Here,  then,  the  tone  is  more 
pathetic,  elegiac.  We  are  bidden  to  watch  the  crushing  of 
unselfish  simplicity  under  the  relentless  pressure  of  egoism. 
But  into  episodes  in  the  story  Balzac  has  infused  much  of 


The  Maturity  of  Balzac  163 

his  own  spirit  as  an  amateur  collector,  and  it  is  said  that 
more  than  one  treasure  from  Pons'  collection  was  in  the 
author's.  This  gives  the  story  a  less  intense  unity  than 
Cousin  Betty y  and  there  is  also  a  regrettable  abuse  of  dialect 
that  threatens  to  change  our  admiration  for  Schmucke's 
virtues  into  irritation  at  his  imbecility.  On  the  whole 
Cousin  Pons  is  most  admirable  for  those  pages  in  which  it 
most  resembles  Cousin  Betty,  The  concierge,  La  Cibot, 
whose  negative  virtue  is  transformed  before  our  eyes  into 
the  basest  unscrupulousness  by  social  ambition,  is  a  marvel 
of  voluble  hypocrisy,  as  terrible  as  Zola's  Th^rese  Raquia 
in  her  exhibition  of  the  mastery  of  a  fixed  idea,  which 
indeed  appears  also  in  the  Auvergnat  junk-dealer  Roma- 
nencq,  another  character  conceived  with  great  power.  The 
novel  has  scenes  as  strong,  as  touching  and  as  unspeakably 
horrible  as  any  that  Balzac  ever  wrote,  but  as  a  whole  it  is 
inferior  to  Cousin  Betty,  if  indeed  it  is  just  to  speak  of  in- 
feriority among  wx)rks  both  so  excellent  and  so  far  above 
even  the  usual  high  level  of  their  author. 

If,  as  Balzac  has  been  at  pains  to  show  us  in  the  whole 
series  of  his  economic  and  political  novels,  materialism  is 
the  foundation  of  contemporary  ethics,,  and  mediocracy  of 
contemporary  politics,  what  remains  for  the  representatives 
of  the  old  creed  and  the  old  aristocracy  who  are  not  con- 
tent to  be  AduUamites  and  who  know  that  labour  is  prayer? 
This  is  the  question  that  Balzac  has  asked  himself  in  The 
Reverse  of  Contemporary  Histoiy  (I'Envers  de  I'histoire  con- 
temporaine),  which  crowns  his  work  with  an  epic  of  charity 
and  an  elegy  of  pardon.  A  group  of  noble  souls,  to  whose 
hearts  and  fortunes  the  revolutions  have  done  despite,  band 
themselves  together  into  the  Brotherhood  of  Consolation, 
with  Madame  de  la  Chanterie  for  their  head,  and  Thomas  i 


164      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

Kempis  for  their  guide.  During  one  of  the  risings  in  the 
West  against  Napoleon,  Madame  de  la  Chanterie  had  been 
betrayed  and  her  daughter  guillotined  by  her  son-in-law, 
the  renegade  noble  and  police-spy  Contenson,  abetted  by  an 
unscrupulous  judge,  Bourlac.  This  Bourlac,  now  reduced  to 
the  greatest  misery,  is  saved  from  torture  of  mind,  heart, 
and  body  by  the  unremitting  and  hidden  charity  of  the 
woman  he  had  imprisoned  and  whose  daughter  he  had 
practically  murdered.  The  theme,  then,  is  Christian  for- 
giveness, and  the  book,  especially  in  its  frequent  ethical 
and  philosophical  digressions,  takes  the  form  of  a  pathetic 
plea  for  a  faith  that  the  author  feels  is  passing  away  with 
the  deadening  of  the  spiritual  life  of  his  country.  Madame 
de  la  Chanterie  is  perhaps  the  noblest  female  figure  that 
Balzac  has  conceived,  finer  than  Josephine  Claes  or 
Madame  de  Mortsauf,  surely  finer  than  Veronique  Graslin. 
And  so  thei  Hmnan  Comedy  rises  per  angusta  ad  augusfUj 
from  petty  baseness  to  august  nobility.  It  has  its  Inferno 
and  its  Purgatorio,  but  it  ends  w^ith  a  beatific  vision. 

Balzac's  last  years  were  made  unfruitful  by  illness.  He 
spent  the  greater  part  of  his  time  in  Russia,  whence  shortly 
after  his  marriage  with  Madame  Hanska  he  returned  to 
Paris,  to  die  there  on  the  twelfth  of  August,  1850.  At  his 
funeral  Hugo  addressed  those  who  had  come  to  do  honour 
to  one  who  was  to  remain  among  the  great  glories  of  their 
hterature.  "Such  coffins,"  said  the  poet,  "proclaim  im- 
mortality. We  feel  the  divine  destiny  of  that  intellect  that 
has  traversed  earth  to  suffer  and  be  purified.  So  great  a 
genius  in  this  life  cannot  but  be  a  great  spirit  hereafter." 


CHAPTER  VII. 

THE   GENIUS   OF   BALZAC. 

IT  remains  to  us,  from  that  summit  of  P^re  Lachaise 
where  Balzac  lies  buried,  to  survey  his  work  as  a  whole, 
and  to  show,  if  it  may  be,  wherein  and  why  Balzac  is  the 
greatest  novelist  and  one  of  the  greatest  seers  of  the  human 
heart  in  all  literature.  Let  us  consider  first  what  he  tried 
to  do,  as  he  states  it  in  the  preface  to  his  Human  Comedy, 
as  it  may  be  read  in  the  volume  entitled  The  Cat  and  the 
Racket  (la  Maison  du  chat  qui  pelote). 

He  says  here  that  the  first  thought  of  a  Human  Com- 
edy came  to  him  like  a  hazy  dream  or  some  impossible 
project  that  one  caresses  and  then  lets  float  away.  Might 
it  not  be  possible,  he  had  thought,  to  do  for  human  nature 
what  Saint- Hilaire  had  done  for  the  animal  kingdom,  to 
show  that  all  society  was  bound  together  by  a  unity  of  com- 
position which  an  evolution  in  varied  environments  had 
diversified,  so  that  there  were  different  species  of  men  just 
as  there  were  different  zoological  varieties  ?  Might  it  not 
be  as  possible,  though  surely  more  difficult,  to  seize  the 
differences  that  distinguish  a  soldier,  a  workman,  a  lawyer, 
a  scholar,  a  statesman,  a  merchant,  as  those  that  differen- 
tiate the  wolf,  the  lion,  the  ass,  the  raven,  the  shark,  and 
the  sheep?  Might  not  Buffon's  work  for  nature  be  re- 
peated for  society?  But  when  he  reached  this  point,  he 
says  he  hesitated.  To  do  this  would  require  three  thou- 
sand, perhaps  four  thousand  characters,  and  he  saw  that 


1 66     A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

even  the  genius  of  Scott  had  not  been  able  to  give  unity  to 
his  creative  fecundity.  Then,  after  a  time,  as  with  a  flash, 
the  thought  came  to  him  :  Let  French  society  be  the  his- 
torian and  myself  its  secretary.  I  will  draw  up  the  inven- 
tory of  its  vices  and  its  virtues,  gather  the  princij5al  facts  of 
its  passions,  compose  types  for  it  by  uniting  homogeneous 
natures  into  a  composite  character,  and  so  perhaps  I  shall 
succeed  in  writing  that  history  that  so  many  historians  have 
forgotten,  the  history  of  manners.  And  my  point  of  view, 
the  fulcrum  from  which  my  work  shall  move  my  readers, 
shall  be  that  of  the  conservative  Christian  monarchist,  who 
has  lived  under  the  Emperor,  the  Bourbons,  and  the  Or- 
leanist,  knows  through  friends  the  Republic  and  the  Old 
Regime,  has  an  instinctive  hate  of  mediocracy,  and  thinks 
government  by  universal  suffrage  "the  only  one  where 
tyranny  is  boundless,  and  the  only  one  that  is  irresponsible." 
The  novels,  that  are  to  be  the  minutes  of  this  secretary 
of  society,  are  to  be  ideal  in  their  general  conception,  but 
real  in  their  details.  They  must  shrink  neither  from  the 
painting  of  vice  in  its  nakedness  nor  from  the  passion  that 
melts  and  recasts  our  human  nature,  for  without  passion 
what  place  would  remain  for  religion,  history,  fiction,  or 
art?  And  here  he  pauses  to  defend  himself  from  the 
strange  charge  that  he  is  a  sensualist,  an  absurd  accusation 
that  has  been  thrown  up  by  moral  moles  against  all  his  suc- 
cessors, —  not  unnaturally  indeed,  for  the  accusation  is  easy 
to  make,  it  casts  a  sort  of  halo  of  self-righteousness  about 
the  accuser,  and  is  almost  impossible  to  disprove  or  to 
efface  from  minds  soft  enough  to  receive  the  impression. 
He  claims  boldly  and  truly  that  he  has  succeeded  in  the 
difificult  literary  problem  of  making  virtue  interesting. 
There  are  many  noble  souls  in  the  Human  Comedy.     How 


The  Genius  of  Balzac  167 

fresh  in  the  mind  of  every  reader  is  the  fragrant  memory  of 
Pierette  Lorain,  of  Ursule  Mirouet,  of  Constance  Birotteau, 
of  Eugenie  Grandet,  of  Marguerite  Claes,  of  five  Chardon, 
of  Ren^e  de  Maucombe,  Madame  Firmiani,  and,  above 
them  all,  the  angelic  Madame  de  la  Chanteraie ;  and  who 
shall  say  that  manly  virtue  is  not  lovable  in  Joseph  Lebas, 
in  Genestas,  in  Dr.  Benassis  and  Dr.  Mirouet,  in  the 
curates  Birotteau,  Bonnet,  and  Chaperon,  in  the  righteous 
judge  Popinot,  and  the  printer  David  Sechard?  while  Bal- 
zac has  crowned  his  defence  of  human  nature  in  the  char- 
acters of  Schmucke  and  his  friend  Pons.  There  is  no  need 
to  continue  the  list.  All  that  he  need  ask  is  that  his  work 
be  read  as  a  whole,  for  as  a  whole  it  must  be  pronounced 
serious  in  purpose,  high  and  edifying  in  tone. 

We  speak  of  reading  it  as  a  whole,  yet  we  know  it  is 
incomplete.  But  what  remains  is  cyclopean.  It  was,  as 
he  said,  no  small  task  to  conceive  and  paint  the  living  por- 
trait of  two  thousand  of  the  striking  figures  of  an  epoch, 
and  in  their  mimic  life  to  formulate  not  only  individuals 
but  the  chief  events  of  social  life,  those  situations  that  are 
reproduced  in  all  existences,  and  then  to  give  to  his  scenes 
such  a  variety  of  setting  that  his  work  should  have  its  geog- 
raphy as  well  as  its  genealogy.  The  immensity  of  such  a 
plan,  that  embraced  at  once  the  history  and  the  criticism  of 
the  society  of  half  a  century,  the  analysis  of  its  ills,  and  the 
investigation  of  its  fundamental  principles,  could  alone 
authorize  the  title,  ambitious  and  yet  just,  "  The  Comedy 
of  Human  Life." 

This  Comedy  he  divided,  adopting  in  part  previously 
chosen  collective  titles,  into  Scenes  of  private  life,  of  pro- 
vincial and  Parisian  life,  of  agricultural  and  village  life  {vie 
de  cajnpagne)f  of  politics  and  war,  and  to  these  he  added  a 


i68      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

series  of  philosophic  studies.  There  are  those  who  extol 
the  analytic  acumen  displayed  in  this  arrangement,  but  it 
is  to  be  feared  that  they  are  the  dupes  of  a  scheme  more 
convenient  to  the  publisher  than  valuable  to  the  reader. 
For  Balzac  frequently  transferred  tales  and  novels  from  one 
series  to  another  to  suit  the  publisher's  convenience  or 
his  own  changed  fancy ;  and  it  is  time  wasted  to  insist  on  a 
classification  that  places  A  Passion  in  the  Desert  among 
military  scenes,  and  Adieu  among  philosophic  studies,  with 
Sarrasine  hovering  between  philosophy  and  Paris,  and  Pere 
Goriot  between  Parisian  and  private  life.  The  only  "  phil- 
osophic "  way  to  study  Balzac's  work  is  to  study  it  first  as 
it  grew  in  the  author's  mind,  and  then  as  it  presents  itself 
in  its  entirety.  The  former  we  have  already  endeavoured. 
The  latter  we  will  now  essay.  But  first  a  word  in  regard 
to  the  attitude  of  criticism  toward  Balzac  in  the ,  last  fifty 
years. 

He  died  at  the  height  of  his  fame,  widely  mourned,  and  yet 
hardly  appreciated  by  the  critics  or  by  the  public ;  else  how 
could  Sainte-Beuve,  in  his  thoughtful  Essay  ("  Causeries," 
ii.  443)  have  compared  Balzac,  as  like  in  kind,  to  Dumas 
pere  or  to  Eugene  Sue?  How  could  he  have  spoken  with 
a  certain  condescending  regret  of  the  talent  that  had  passed 
away,  while  he  ignored  the  genius,  or  have  wished  for  the 
novelist  of  the  future  "a  calmer  life,  inspirations  more 
subtle,  but  gentler,  healthier,  more  serene?"  It  is  true 
that  old  wounds  may  have  rankled  in  Sainte-Beuve's  breast, 
and  yet  very  few  at  that  time  measured  at  all  the  height 
of  that  splendid  and  sovereign  intelligence  which,  as  Hugo 
said  at  Balzac's  grave,  "  disclosed  in  sudden  revelations  the 
most  sombre  and  tragic  ideals,  .  .  .  dug  into  and  sounded 
the  depths  of  the  abyss  that  is  in  every  man,  and  could 


The  Genius  of  Balzac  169 

rise  from  those  terrible  studies  that  had  made  MoH^re  mel- 
ancholy and  Rousseau  a  misanthrope,  still  smiling  in  serene 
calm." 

Even  during  the  next  decade  few  discerned  the  supreme 
place  that  is  now  accorded  everywhere,  always,  and  by  all 
to  Balzac  in  fiction.  George  Sand,  writing  with  complacent 
garrulity  in  1857,  sees  indeed  that  he  is  "  the  first  of  novel- 
ists "  and  "  pre-eminently  the  critic  of  human  life."  The 
novel  was  to  him,  she  says,  "a  frame  and  pretext  for  an 
almost  universal  examination  of  the  ideas,  sentiments,  cus- 
toms, habits,  legislation,  art,  trades,  costumes,  localities,  —  in 
short,  of  all  that  constituted  the  lives  of  his  contempora- 
ries." She  saw  that  "  this  great  anatomist  of  Hfe  "  was 
essentially  moral  in  his  life  and  works.  But  she  thought 
he  lacked  the  power  to  idealise  sentiment,  that  his  style  was 
laboured,  his  taste  false,  and  his  composition  bad,  though 
these  great  faults  were,  she  admitted,  redeemed  by  great 
merits. 

In  1859  Gautier  followed  with  his  friendly  "  portrait," 
which,  like  everything  that  Gautier's  pen  touched,  is  charm- 
ing, but  it  is  surely  not  criticism  in  any  serious  sense,  nor 
meant  to  be.  Then  followed  the  really  epoch-making 
study  of  Taine  in  1865.  Since  then  the  lamp  of  Balzac's 
fame  has  burned  ever  steadier  and  brighter.  Taine  first 
saw  the  monumental,  classic  character  of  Balzac's  novels, 
that  element  that  made  him  not  of  an  age  but  for  all  time. 
And  ever  since  there  has  been  gathering  around  Balzac  a 
literature  that  has  revealed  to  us  more  and  more  of  the 
depth  and  breadth  of  his  social  vision,  and  has  established 
his  place  as  one  of  the  world's  great  creators  in  the  realm 
of  imaginative  literature. 

The  dominant  trait  in  Balzac,  whether  we  consider  his . 


170     A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

style,  his  imagination,  or  his  thought,  is  exuberant  virility. 
He  seemed,  said  Champfleury,  *'  like  a  wild  boar  at  play." 
His  life  is  always  intense,  both  in  his  work  and  in  his  recre- 
ation. No  labor  is  so  irksome  to  him  as  idleness,  no  feat 
of  the  imagination  so  difficult  to  him  as  its  repose.  His 
animal  nature  is  as  ebullient  as  his  intellectual.  Probably 
chaste  in  life,  he  delights  in  debauches  of  cerebral  sensu- 
ality, which  he  drapes  in  a  piquantly  diaphanous  medieval 
veil,  for  he  is  a  complete  rnan  and  extreme  in  every  mani- 
festation of  his  nature.  We  shall  see  this  intemperance  in 
his  style,  in  his  thought,  in  his  imagination,  in  his  composition. 
It  is  this  that  makes  him  a  romantic  realist,  the  incarnation 
of  the  natural  and  sane  reaction  from  a  generation  that  had 
nursed  a  sentimental  morbidity  on  Ren^  and  Obermann. 
Romantic  by  the  vigour  of  his  imagination,  he  was  realist  by 
the  nature  of  his  mind.  As  one  of  his  critics  has  said,  he 
united  the  temperament  of  an  artist  to  the  spirit  of  a  com- 
mercial traveller,  —  an  epigrammatic  way  of  saying  that  he 
observed  quickly  and  accurately  all  about  him  in  its  practi- 
cal aspects  like  a  man  of  business,  who  trusts  he  is  disa- 
bused of  the  illusions  of  the  ideal,  who  understands  quite  well 
that  money  is  the  mainspring  of  the  new  democratic  society, 
for  better  or  worse,  as  it  had  been  of  all  his  own  adult  life. 
For,  as  Taine  excellently  says,  Balzac  was  not  only  a  busy 
man  and  a  man  of  business,  he  was  so  with  a  Parisian 
intensity.  "  In  this  black  ant-heap  of  Paris  democratic 
institutions  and  centralised  government  have  gathered  all 
the  ambitious  and  inflamed  all  ambitions.  ...  To  succeed, 
that  word  unknown  a  century  ago,  is  the  sovereign  master 
of  all  lives ;  "  and  it  is  this  that  gives  to  Balzac  his  titanic 
energy,  that  wishes  to  be  all-embracing  even  at  the  cost  of 
haste  and  incompleteness.    "  Hoping  to  build  a  monument 


The  Genius  of  Balzac  171 

that  shall  endure  rather  by  its  mass  and  by  the  heaping  up 
of  its  materials  than  by  the  beauty  of  the  edifice,  I  am 
obliged,"  he  writes  to  Madame  Hanska,  "to  touch  on 
everything,  that  I  be  not  accused  of  impotence."  Thus 
Balzac,  as  well  as  his  Human  Comedy^  reflects  the  spirit  of 
his  time,  the  spirit  of  intense  labour  and  desperate  struggle 
with  an  ever-widening  sea  of  things  to  be  known,  of  forces 
to  be  conquered,  of  complex  interests  to  be  reconciled. 
He  shrinks  from  the  conception  of  the  world  in  which  he 
labours,  "  that  great  cloudy  cancer  spread  out  over  both 
banks  of  the  Seine."  Yet  no  one  that  had  been  less  of  his 
age,  no  one  who  had  been  less  typical  of  its  struggle  for 
life,  could  have  rendered  that  state  of  soul  in  its  grand  and 
terrible  manifestations  and  in  its  little  unconscious  betray- 
als in  garment  and  gesture,  could  have  seen  it  with  a 
judicial  eye,  seen  through  it  with  analytic  insight,  and  be^ 
yond  it  with  a  seer's  vision.  He  was  so  wholly  of  his 
world,  and  yet  he  so  wholly  dominated  it.  Nothing  human 
was  foreign  to  him,  neither  grossness,  nor  sensuality,  nor 
luxury,  nor  the  passion  of  the  artist  and  the  collector,  nor 
the  unbridled  curiosity  that  for  a  new  experience  is  ready, 
with  the  aid  of  hashish  or  opium,  — 

"  To  plunge  to  the  gulf's  bottom,  heaven  or  hell,  what  reck  we  ? 
To  the  bottom  of  the  unknown  to  find  the  new." 

And  yet  with,  may  we  not  say  because  of,  this  intensity  of 
physical  and  material  life,  he  was  haunted  with  the  ques- 
tions of  political  sociology  and  moral  economy,  and  capable 
of  rising  on  the  wings  of  an  inspired  fancy  to  the  mystic 
union  of  the  soul  with  the  sources  of  its  spiritual  being. 
For  shall  not  he  who  has  a  perfect  knowledge  of  the  muddy 
vesture  of  decay  that  wraps  the  soul  have  glimpses  of  the 


172     A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

soul  ?  Shall  he  who  knows  the  chrysalis  be  ignorant  of  the 
butterfly? 

No  person  less  broadly  human  than  Balzac  could  have 
written  Seraphiia.  No  person  less  gifted  with  spiritual 
vision  than  the  author  of  Seraphita  may  write  without  fear 
or  reproach  Cousin  Betty  and  the  Droll  Stories.  Such  a 
brain  was  necessary,  says  Taine,  in  a  passage  that  itself 
conveys  somewhat  of  the  vertiginous  quahty  that  we  feel  in 
Balzac,  "  a  brain  with  its  surroundings  and  its  mode  of  exist- 
ence, to  vivify  that  enormous  forest  of  ideas  to  empurple 
the  flowers  in  it  with  that  sombre  metallic  lustre,  to  fill  its 
fruits  with  that  mordant  and  too  intense  sap.  .  .  .  The 
style  is  embarrassed,  overloaded.  The  ideas  jostle  and  stifle 
one  another.  Complicated  intrigues  seize  the  mind  with 
their  iron  pincers ;  piled  up  passions  blaze  and  roar  as  in  a 
furnace.  And  under  that  wild  light  stand  out  in  sharp 
relief  a  multitude  of  figures  with  set,  tormented  faces,  more 
expressive,  powerful,  living  than  the  real  themselves ;  among 
them  a  vile  vermin  of  human  insects,  crawling  caterpillars, 
hideous  lizards,  venomous  spiders  born  in  festering  decay, 
fierce  to  burrow,  to  tear,  to  accumulate  and  to  bite ;  and 
over  all  are  dazzling  fairy  spectacles  and  dolorous  night- 
mares big  with  all  the  dreams  that  gold,  science,  art,  glory, 
and  power  can  inspire."  If  such  power  seem  more  than 
human,  let  us  remember  that  we  cannot  measure  genius 
with  the  yardstick  of  the  commonplace.  If  we  cannot 
comprehend  Balzac  nor  find  the  universal  formula  that  shall 
correlate  the  multitudinous  phases  of  his  protean  genius,  it 
is  at  least  something  that  we  should  know  wherein  and  why 
it  eludes  our  comprehension. 

In  the  endeavour  to  approximate  to  this  correlation,  of 
whose  inadequacy  no  one  will  be  more  conscious  than  is 


The  Genius  of  Balzac  173 

the  author,  it  will  be  well  to  consider  first  Balzac*s  style, 
then  his  manner  of  constructing  his  stories,  to  pass  thence 
to  his  view  of  society  as  represented  in  his  characters,  and 
finally  to  consider  his  philosophy  of  life. 

If  Balzac's  style  is  sometimes  heavy,  it  is  not  for  lack  of 
care.  He  himself,  while  saying  that  there  were  but  three 
men  in  Paris  who  knew  French,  Gautier,  Hugo,  and  himself, 
which  in  a  sense  was  true,  was,  as  we  have  seen,  constantly 
tormented  by  artistic  scruples,  correcting  and  recorrecting 
his  proofs,  thinking  that  his  reputation  depended  on  third 
and  fourth  revisions,  and  making  alterations  that  equalled 
and  often  far  exceeded  the  original  cost  of  composition ; 
but  it  may  be  doubted  if  the  last  state  of  his  copy  was  not 
often  worse  than  the  first.  His  error  is  not  carelessness 
but  over- elaboration.  The  sentence  is  apt  to  drag  its  coils 
around  the  idea,  to  constrict  it  instead  of  transfixing  it. 
And  then  he  is  embarrassed  by  his  wealth  of  words.  Noth- 
ing so  admirable  as  the  descriptive  power  of  his  epithets ; 
few  things  so  exasperating  as  the  familiar  thought  veiled 
under  technical  terms.  You  are  teased  with  the  hope  of 
some  flash  light  of  genius,  and  are  irritated  to  find  that  the 
bizarre  language  masks  only  a  respectable  commonplace. 
He  is  not  conscious  of  this.  The  words  are  not  bizarre  to 
him.  He  "knows  the  language."  But,  as  he  said,  there 
were  only  two  others  in  Paris  who  did  so,  and  Taine  is  not 
wrong  when  he  observes  that  the  reader  of  Balzac  will  have 
to  endure  sometimes  what  will  seem  to  him  "  scientific 
jargon,  philosophic  clap-trap,  and  grandiloquence."  But 
Taine  exaggerates  this  fault,  and  notes  justly  that  the  feeling 
is  intensified  by  the  modes  of  thought  and  culture  inherited 
from  the  French  eighteenth  century.  It  is  there,  however, 
and  it  is  a  fault,  but  it  has  its  compensations. 


174      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

Here,  as  so  often,  the  style  is  the  man.  It  is  the  natural 
mold  for  the  ore  that  flows  from  this  seven  times  heated 
furnace  of  imagination.  Balzac's  course  could  never  have 
shackled  itself  to  the  mincing  steps  of  eighteenth-cen- 
tury classicism.  If  he  studied,  as  he  said,  for  seven  years 
before  comprehending  the  French  language,  it  was  that  he 
might  make  it  his  instrument,  fashioned  to  his  pen,  suited 
to  his  mind.  And,  for  him,  language  was  not  primarily  to 
convey  thoughts  in  logical  sequence,  but  to  evoke  images 
in  picturesque  and  suggestive  succession.  This  new  end 
could  not  be  attained  by  the  old  laws  of  rhetoric  and 
eloquence,  for  he  was  concerned  with  evoking  new  images, 
not  with  the  kaleidoscopic  redistribution  of  old  thoughts. 
The  mind  is  strangely  stimulated  by  these  images,  drawn 
from  all  the  multiplicity  of  its  experience,  so  that  the 
whole  range  of  our  sense-perceptions  is  brought  into  cor- 
relation ;  **  chemistry  explains  love,  cookery  has  its  bearing 
on  politics,  music  and  the  grocery  business  are  related  to 
philosophy,"  and  the  whole  of  our  knowledge  is  wovea 
together  into  a  network  where  each  is  connected  with  all. 

A  style  so  interpenetrated  with  creative  imagination  has 
in  its  intenser  passages  an  element  of  poetry  that  is  singu- 
larly fascinating  to  many  minds.  The  pages  swarm  with 
implied  or  real  metaphors,  the  brain  seems  in  a  constant 
travail  of  creation,  an  endless  ebullition  of  images.  Read 
the  description  of  the  bouquet  in  The  Lily  in  the  Valley, 
There  is  nothing  to  exceed  it  in  its  kind  outside  of  the 
verse  of  Hugo,  and  it  is  approached  but  seldom  by  Zola. 
There  is  but  one  adjective  to  define  it,  an  adjective  that 
recurs  so  often  to  him  who  would  write  of  the  genius  or 
the  labour  or  the  style  of  Balzac,  —  it  is  vertiginous.  Your 
head  swims  as  you  read  of  those  perfumes  that  communi- 


The  Genius  of  Balzac  175 

cate  to  all  beings  the  intoxication  of  fecundation,  so  that 
your  thoughts  renew  their  green.  Inexhaustible  exhala- 
tions stir  at  the  bottom  of  your  heart  the  budding  roses 
that  modesty  represses  there.  There  are  leaves  that  seem 
the  vague  image  of  longed-for  forms,  supplely  bending 
like  those  of  some  submissive  slave.  Above  them  stretch 
out  flowers  prostrate  and  humble,  as  suppliant  as  prayers. 
Others  above  these  seem  like  those  deep  violet  hopes 
with  which  first  dreams  are  crowned,  and  others  with  their 
twining  stalks  like  vague  desires  twisted  in  the  recesses  of 
the  soul.  "And  from  the  bosom  of  this  rushing,  over- 
flowing torrent  of  love  there  darts  a  magnificent  double  red 
poppy  spreading  the  flame  tongues  of  its  fire  above  starred 
jasmines  and  dominating  the  incessant  rain  of  pollen,  that 
sparkles  like  a  beautiful  cloud  in  the  air,  reflecting  the 
light  from  its  thousand  dazzling  particles.  What  woman, 
intoxicated  by  the  odour  of  love  hidden  in  vernal  grass, 
will  not  comprehend  the  luxuriousness  of  that  yielding,  that 
tender  whiteness,  troubled  by  movements  uncontrolled,  and 
then  —  that  red  desire.  ...  All  that  we  offer  to  God  was 
it  not  offered  to  love  in  that  poem  of  luminous  flowers  that 
sang  incessantly  their  low  melodies  to  the  heart,  caressing 
there  its  hidden  joys,  its  unavowed  hopes,  its  illusions  that 
blush  into  life  and  die  away  like  the  virgin  cobwebs  of  a 
summer  night?'*  This  paraphrase  is  but  a  fragment  of  the 
passage,  but  it  will  illustrate  my  meaning  better  than  any 
words  of  mine,  for  the  only  way  to  describe  Balzac's  style  in 
its  glory  is  to  let  him  speak  for  himself. 

But  no  man's  best  is  his  average.  It  is  obvious  that 
what  has  been  said  can  apply  in  its  entirety  to  but  few  of 
the  ninety-two  titles  that  make  up  the  Human  Comedy, 
Much  of  any  novelist's  work  is  straightforward  narration,. 


176      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

much  is  dialogue  through  which  the  author  reveals  char- 
acter, explains  its  evolution,  or  advances  the  action.  When 
the  narrative  does  not  call  for  epic  breadth  or  dramatic 
intensity  Balzac  is  apt  to  hurry  on  from  picturesque  descrip- 
tion to  psychological  reflection  or  dialogue,  and  here  his 
style  is  often  simply  the  style  of  everybody,  and  calls  for  no 
comment.  Where  action  is  to  be  narrated  he  prefers  to 
put  his  description  of  it  into  the  mouths  of  his  characters, 
and  in  this  kind  he  gives  us  such  masterpieces  as  the  story 
of  Napoleon  in  the  Country  Doctor^  or  of  the  passage  of 
the  Beresina  in  Adieu.  This  suggests  what  may  be  a  fault 
in  his  dialogue.  His  characters  are  apt  to  speak  at  length, 
to  indulge  in  tirades.  There  is  little  sparkle  in  his  conver- 
sation, little  repartee  and  fencing  of  wit,  and  what  there  is 
is  not  always  of  the  best.  He  is  more  successful  with  the 
lower  than  with  the  higher  social  spheres,  better  with 
intense  or  eccentric  characters  than  with  his  men  and 
women  of  the  world,  but  he  occasionally  over-charges  his 
effects,  notably  in  the  stammering  of  Grandet  and  the 
jargon  of  Nucingen  and  Schmucke,  in  which  he  is  said  to 
have  found  delight,  and  in  which  his  readers  surely  find 
weariness. 

Both  in  description  and  in  the  longer  speeches  his 
periods  are  apt  to  be  over  long  and  involved,  the  result, 
it  may  seem,  of  his  method  of  composition.  Taine  piti- 
lessly collected  a  number  of  the  most  glaring  instances  of 
this  fault,  and  it  has  since  been  usual  to  say  that  Balzac's 
style  is  bad ;  but  such  passages  are  not  very  numerous,  and 
they  are  the  defects  of  really  great  and  unique  qualities 
which  show  their  promise  on  almost  every  page,  and  attain 
not  infrequently  a  great  achievement.  And  in  almost 
every   novel  both  good  and  bad  coexist  with  a  great  mass 


The  Genius  of  Balzac  177 

of  what  is  simply  ordinary,  for  with  all  his  care  Balzac 
never  attained  the  sustained  polish  of  Merim^e,  Flaubert, 
or  Maupassant,  and  probably  never  aspired  to  the  persistent 
dithyrambic  of  Hugo's  prose. 

In  the  construction  of  the  novels  regarded  as  stories 
there  is  a  noteworthy  lack  of  proportion,  but  if  we  regard 
them  as  studies  of  character  they  will  be  seen  to  have  a 
greater,  sometimes  an  entire  unity.  The  best  constructed 
of  the  novels  are,  doubtless,  Eugenie  Grandet  and  7'he  Poor 
Relatives^  but  even  here  the  narrative  is  interrupted  by  di- 
gressions that  seem  like  little  essays,  and  by  descriptions  of 
quite  unnecessary  minuteness.  Every  reader  of  Balzac  will 
have  noticed  with  what  detail  he  fixes  the  scene  of  his  story, 
the  city,  the  street,  the  house,  the  room.  We  can  almost 
count  the  fly-specks  on  the  walls  of  the  Vauquer  boarding- 
house,  and  the  number  of  steps  in  Grandet's  stairway. 
From  house  we  pass  to  furniture,  from  furniture  to  clothes, 
and  the  bodily  externals  of  manner,  and  face,  and  hands. 
Then  we  learn  of  the  man's  previous  life,  of  his  antece- 
dents, his  friends,  his  bank  account.  All  this  makes  the 
story  slow  in  getting  under  way,  but  once  started  it  has 
the  greater  momentum.  You  see  his  figures  and  live  their 
life,  as  happens  with  few  other  novelists,  but  it  must  be  ad- 
mitted that  Flaubert  attains  the  same  effect  with  better- 
hidden  art.  As  Taine  puts  it,  "There  was  in  Balzac  an 
archeologist,  an  architect,  an  upholsterer,  a  tailor,  an  old- 
clothes-dealer,  an  appraiser,  a  physiologist,  and  a  notary." 
One  by  one  these  came  and  read  to  him  their  detailed  re- 
ports. Only  then  did  the  fire  of  composition  begin.  This 
is  a  fault,  and  would  have  been  serious  had  it  not  been  that 
his  age  and  ours  find  almost  as  much  pleasure  in  science  as 
in  art,  with  a  delight  in  reality  for  its  own  sake,  a  tendency 

12 


178      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

that  has  found  its  fullest  expression  in  Zcla.  Many  of  Bal- 
zac's descriptions  are  minutely  photographic  rather  than 
broadly  picturesque.  We  see  the  room  or  the  landscape 
rather  than  feel  their  psychic  influence.  And  yet  Balzac's 
interest  is  never  in  description  for  its  own  sake,  but  always 
in  its  effect  on  character,  which  through  the  very  multipli- 
city of  these  prolix  details  insinuates  itself  more  completely 
into  the  mind,  so  that  those  philosophers  who  see  in  char- 
acter the  sum  of  environing  influences  will  naturally  most 
admire  both  his  method  and  its  results. 

Taine  "  dares  to  say  that  Balzac  has  risen  to  the  level  of 
Shakspere."  We  should  perhaps  say  that  he  has  produced 
the  same  effects,  though  less  often  and  less  defdy,  because 
he  was  a  slightly  inferior  genius  and  a  much  inferior  artist. 
His  characters  live  in  the  mind  long  after  his  plots  have 
faded  from  them.  They  are  often  too  complex.  If  one 
reads  Balzac  for  the  story,  Cerfbeer's  Balzacian  Dictionary 
{^Repertoire)  is  almost  as  essential  to  enjoyment  as  the 
novel  itself,  and  if  one  is  studying  character  it  is  a  neces- 
sity. No  ordinary  brain  can  carry  this  complex  diversity 
and  grasp  at  once  the  detail  and  its  place  in  the  general 
composition.  And  yet  this  last  is  most  essential  to  any  just 
comprehension  of  Balzac,  for  he  wished  his  work  to  be  a 
philosophy  of  human  life.  He  saw  each  in  its  relation  to 
all.  His  steadfast  aim  was  to  give  what  Taine  calls  *'  an 
abridged  history  of  the  nineteenth  century,"  which  should 
be  at  the  same  time  "the  eternal  history  of  the  heart." 
Therefore  it  is  that  he  is  preeminently  systematic,  that  his 
work  must  be  judged  as  a  whole  to  be  judged  at  all.  Let 
us  consider  now  the  parts  of  his  system,  the  successive 
strata  of  his  society. 

At  the  bottom  are  the  narrow  money-grubbers,  provin- 


The  Genius  of  Balzac  179 

cials  often  and  usually  tradespeople,  always  commonplace, 
yet  immensely  varied,  for  Balzac  comprehends  and  enters 
into  their  dreary  materialism  as  it  shows  itself  in  attitude, 
word,  and  gesture,  more  fully  than  any  other  French  novel- 
ist, unless  it  be  Flaubert.  Of  these  men  the  five-franc 
piece  is  indeed  the  mainspring,  and  it  would  seem  that 
they  interest  him  most.  At  least  he  leaves  them  almost  all 
rich  and  with  a  satisfied  ambition.  Nucingen  has  his 
thirty  millions,  Rastignac  is  a  minister,  Tillet  satisfies  every 
lust  and  vengeance ;  even  Rigou  of  The  Peasants  has  his 
way.  An  iron  will,  pursuing  purely  material  ends,  would  be 
the  strongest  force  known  to  the  Human  Comedy^  "  unless," 
as  Balzac  himself  says,  "there  were  a  God." 

Over  against  these  we  may  naturally  set  off  the  young 
people,  in  whom  experience  has  not  yet  killed  the  power  of 
romantic  devotion.  Such  are  apt  to  become  their  passion's 
fool,  as  Caliste  de  Guenic  and  Lucien  de  Rubempre,  or  in- 
carnations of  world liness  like  Rastignac.  Rare  exceedingly 
is  the  final  balance  of  power  between  sentiment  and  wis- 
dom as  we  see  it  in  Ft^lix  de  Vandenesse.  It  might  seem 
that  Balzac  saw  what  Musset,  Stendhal,  and  so  many  others 
regretted,  that  the  young  men  of  that  day  lacked  moral 
force,  and  were  suffering  from  a  weariness  of  the  will  that 
sank  from  high  ideals  to  those  lower  ambitions  that  had  their 
last  blossoming  in  such  men  as  Maxime  de  Trailles  and  his 
fellow  dandies  of  the  boulevards,  —  a  race  that  could  be  as 
confidently  predicted  in  the  generation  that  should  follow 
Waterloo  as  it  would  be  out  of  place  in  the  generation  that 
followed  Sedan. 

Besides  these  realistically  studied  normal  money-grubbers 
and  money-spenders,  there  are  symbolic  exaggerations  of 
these  types  that  we  may  note  later.     And  then  there  are 


i8o     A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

the  grotesques  of  virtue,  men  whom  Balzac  means  to  be  ad- 
mirable, but  who,  too  often,  are  exasperating.  Such  are 
Popinot,  the  righteous  judge  and  somewhat  imbecile  dis- 
penser of  charity  ;  such  the  Marquis  d'Espard  with  his  truly 
fantastic  notions  of  honour  and  of  honesty ;  such  too  is  the 
notary  Chesnel  in  his  dogged  devotion  to  the  family  of  the 
Estrignon. 

We  may  dismiss  quite  briefly  the  personages  who  exist 
only  as  raisonneurs^  mouthpieces  like  Bixiou  or  Marsay, 
The  wit  of  these  last  is  sometimes  fiercely  cynical,  though 
never  descending  to  the  satanic  depths  of  Vautrin,  but  more 
often  it  is  coarse,  rollicking,  blunt,  full  of  strange  metaphors 
and  caricatures,  a  medley  of  Rabelais  and  Abraham  a 
Sancta-Clara,  not  unlike  Balzac's  own  conversation  if  we 
may  trust  report,  the  flint-sparks  of  a  heart  repelled  by  real- 
ity and  disillusioned  of  its  ideals.  These  characters  are 
bitter,  misanthropic,  even  brutal.  They  are  Mephistophe- 
lian  pessimists,  sneering  like  Schopenhauer  at  pleasures 
even  while  they  pursue  them,  terrible  commentaries  as  well 
as  commentators  on  the  tendencies  of  social  mediocracy. 

Balzac's  Woman  of  Thirty  was  such  an  immediate  suc- 
cess, and  met  so  obviously  a  long-felt  want  among  feminine 
readers,  that  it  must  have  had  more  elements  of  truth  for  that 
romantic  generation  than  it  has  for  ours.  With  his  young 
girls  he  is,  as  a  rule,  less  successful,  a  little  fearful  perhaps 
of  seeming  dupe  of  their  virtue.  Even  Eugenie  Grandet  is 
not  always  quite  herself,  and  Taine  is  quite  right  to  say  of  a 
certain  letter  of  hers  to  Charles  that  she  would  have  worn 
out  her  inkstand  before  discovering  the  first  phrase,  and 
broken  it  before  writing  the  last.  Here,  more  perhaps  than 
anywhere  else  in  the  Human  Cofnedy^  the  author  shows 
through  the  character,  and  we  see  him,  too,  behind  the 


The  Genius  of  Balzac  i8i 

saintly  wives,  Henriette  de  Mortsauf,  V^ronique  Graslin, 
and  their  like.  His  virtuous  women  perorate  and  weary. 
One  feels  more  sympathy,  more  affection  even,  for  the  ani- 
mal fidelity  of  Big  Nanon,  or  for  the  plaintive  virginity  of 
Mile.  Cormon,  the  "  old  maid."  One  is  far  more  affected 
even  by  that  other  old  maid,  Sophie  Gamard,  or  by  the  dia- 
bolical Sylvie  Rogron.  And  so,  too,  with  the  married 
women,  and  those  who  should  have  been.  As  a  physician 
feels  at  home  in  a  hospital,  so  Balzac  is  more  at  ease  with 
the  morally  sick,  maimed,  or  deformed,  whether  the  disease 
be  mild  and  infantile  as  in  Modeste  Mignon,  or  cancerous 
and  mortal  as  in  Madame  Cibot,  or  distorting  and  half 
ridiculous  as  in  Madame  Soudry  and  Madame  Camus,  or 
ravenously  wolfish  as  in  Madame  Evangelista.  These 
women  have  bartered  themselves  more  or  less  successfully 
for  social  position  and  money,  and  they  will  barter  their 
daughters  for  the  same  and  think  they  are  doing  them  a 
good  service.  Then  there  are  the  forerunners  of  the  new 
woman,  Madame  de  la  Baudraye,  Madame  de  Barge  ton,  or 
the  more  frankly  unconventional  Duchess  of  Maufrigneuse 
and  Duchess  of  Langeais.  But  possibly  most  successful  of 
all  are  the  courtesans,  masked  or  open,  Aquilina,  Jos^pha, 
Esther,  and  the  admirable  Madame  Schontz.  Balzac's 
intense  imagination  dwells  with  almost  equal  pleasure  on 
the  intellectual  debauch  of  the  blue-stocking  Fredeuse  and 
the  orgies  of  overflowing  physical  life,  and  he  is  at  home, 
too,  with  the  parasites  of  social  disease,  such  as  Madame 
Nourisson  or  Jaqueline  Collin. 

But  beyond  all  these,  in  the  depth  of  the  impression  that 
they  make  on  the  mind,  are  a  few  personages  that  may  be 
regarded  less  as  types  of  existing  characters  than  as  symbols 
of  social  tendencies,  of  the  forces  that  move  the  modern 


1 82      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

world.  There  is  the  paternal  instinct  rising  to  a  pitch  of 
sublime  absurdity  in  Goriot ;  there  is  the  triumph  of  brute 
force  over  all  tender  emotion  and  all  moral  restraint  in 
Philippe  Bridau,  the  soldier  let  loose  on  society;  and  in 
Jacques  Collin  there  is  a  similar  triumph  of  will  at  battle  with 
the  world  for  the  flesh  and  the  devil.  Then  there  is  intellec- 
tual absorption  dulling  the  moral  nature  in  Balthazar  Claes, 
and  there  is  avarice  eating  away  mind  and  soul  in  Grandet, 
as  the  sexual  instinct  does  in  the  senile  Baron  Hulot.  All 
these  are  fascinating  creations  of  a  power  that  is  at  once 
poetic  and  moral.  And  we  have  but  begun  the  list.  There 
is  Madame  Marneffe,  of  whom  it  might  be  said,  perhaps 
more  truly  than  of  any  other  in  the  Human  Comedy\  that 
her  feet  lay  hold  on  hell ;  there  is  Cousin  Betty,  the  incarna- 
tion of  jealousy ;  and  we  shall  find  a  similar  mental  devia- 
tion bordering  on  monomania  in  many  minor  figures  also, 
especially  in  the  Philosophic  Studies^  where,  as  Taine  ob- 
serves, the  little  story  of  Massimilla  Doni^  if  we  include  its 
natural  preface  Ganibara,  counts  no  less  than  seven  of 
them.  With  such  symbolic  characters  should  be  ranked 
also  the  mystics,  Louis  Lambert  and  S^raphita.  It  is  per- 
haps their  deviation  from  normal  nature  that  makes  them 
interesting,  and  surely  they  nurse  and  widen  the  scope  of 
the  imagination,  as  it  is  given  only  to  the  greatest  creative 
writers  to  do,  to  Homer,  Dante,  Goethe,  Shakspere.  "  You 
see  less  quickly,  less  easily,  less  brilliantly  "  in  Balzac  than 
in  them,  "  but  you  see  the  same  things,  as  remote  and  as 
deep." 

But  what  then  were  Balzac's  views  of  life  and  of  human 
destiny?  What  was  his  philosophy?  To  ask  such  a  ques- 
tion of  his  contemporaries  in  fiction,  of  Hugo,  Gautier, 
Dumas,  would  be  labor  lost,  but  it  is  not  so  with  him. 


The  Genius  of  Balzac  183 

Indeed,  it  may  be  urged  rather  that  there  is  an  excess  of 
synthesis  in  his  novels,  that  the  individual  work  suffers  from 
the  obtrusion  of  general  ideas,  from  the  constant  endeavour 
to  link  the  special  to  the  universal.  Almost  all  his  person- 
ages reason  about  themselves,  and  what  they  do  not  reveal 
the  author  is  at  pains  to  explain.  Flaubert  will  give  you 
all  the  materials  for  judgment  and  let  you  divine  the  char- 
acter. Balzac  gives  you  the  materials  and  a  commentary 
as  well. 

The  strongest  motives  for  action  in  the  world  as  he  sees 
it,  possibly  the  only  motives,  save  for  exceptional  cases,  and 
as  it  were  by  the  grace  of  God,  are  the  passions,  chief 
among  them  sexuality,  avarice,  and  gluttony.  People  dis- 
guise these  passions  to  themselves  by  their  incapacity  for 
right  reason ;  they  disguise  them  from  others  by  hypocrisy 
and  by  the  mutual  covenants  of  social  life.  But  selfishness 
is  at  the  bottom  of  all,  and  the  democratization  of  society 
has  tended  to  make  this  selfishness  more  base  and  more 
contemptible.  With  society  thus  organized  the  material 
victory  will  be  to  the  strong  and  the  shrewd.  "  The  vir- 
tuous," says  Balzac  in  The  Poor  Relatives,  "have  almost 
always  slight  suspicions  of  their  situation.  They  feel  that 
they  are  the  dupes  in  the  great  market-place  of  life ;  "  which 
is  as  true  now  as  it  was  in  St.  Paul's  day,  though  there  has 
been  doubtless  a  noticeable  development  of  rudimentary 
altruism  and  an  amelioration  of  morals.  But  in  this  Balzac 
sees  no  reason  to  hope  that  society  left  to  itself  will  become 
altruistic  or  virtuous. 

From  this  follows  necessarily  his  profound  aversion  for 
what  he  calls  mediocracy,  beneath  which  he  sees  a  lower 
depth  of  democracy.  He  is  quite  sure  that  the  world  will 
go  wrong  if  the  moral   aristocracy  do    not  set  it   right. 


184      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

Therefore  he  believes  in  large  estates,  a  landed  squirarchy, 
monarchy  by  divine  right,  and  the  established  church.  But 
his  tendency  seems  rather  toward  what  the  Germans  call 
State  Socialism  than  toward  feudality,  though  it  is  not  diffi- 
cult to  find  a  chain  of  phrases  that  would  indicate  in  him 
an  extreme  reactionary  who  regards  absolute  government 
as  the  only  one  under  which  the  laws  will  cease  to  be 
"  spider's-webs  through  which  the  great  flies  break  and  in 
which  the  little  ones  remain,"  the  only  one  that  can  con- 
trol "the  poison  shops"  of  the  press,  and  the  only  one 
where  "  arbitrariness  will  save  the  people  by  coming  to  the 
aid  of  justice,"  and  education  by  religious  orders  shall 
crown  the  edifice  ;  for  it  is  his  conviction  that  "  thought,  the 
source  of  woes  and  blessings,  can  be  prepared,  governed, 
and  directed  only  by  religion." 

For  political  philosophy,  Balzac  lacked  historical  perspec- 
tive. There  were  epochs  of  history  that  he  knew  extremely 
well  in  their  detail  and  in  their  spirit,  but  he  knew  them  as 
a  romancer,  not  as  a  politician.  And  so,  in  his  political 
economy  he  is,  as  he  was  in  his  psychology,  a  seer  rather 
than  an  observer,  with  the  prophet's  confidence  which 
sometimes  surely  was  a  self-deceived  credulity.  One  may 
become  a  demagogue  by  intuition,  but  not  a  statesman. 
So  when  Balzac  reasons  from  his  experience  of  men  he  is 
a  materiaHst,  as  in  Cousin  Pons ;  when  he  lets  his  fancy 
roam  in  a  new  heaven  and  earth,  political,  social,  and  moral, 
he  creates  a  new  man  for  the  new  environment,  as  in  The 
Reverse  of  Contemporary  History,  Louis  Lambert,  or  Sera- 
pliita,  with  a  little  touch  of  materialism  still,  for  his  imagina- 
tion, like  that  of  Gautier,  is  of  the  type  that  seeks  to  body 
its  fancies  in  magnetism.  Mesmerism,  and  "  ethereal  fluids." 

Thus  it  happens,  and  not  unnaturally,  as  Taine  ingen- 


The  Genius  of  Balzac  185 

iously  shows,  that  Balzac  was  at  once  a  materialist  and  a 
mystic,  with  a  mind  that  could  not  dissociate  itself  from 
matter  and  an  imagination  that  could  not  fetter  itself  with 
the  patience  of  scientific  deduction.  Cabanis  had  taught 
that  all  mental  acts  have  a  physical  substratum,  and  led  by 
this  truth,  that  was  to  him  an  ignis  fatuuSy  when  Balzac 
abandoned  observation  he  became  sometimes  a  Sweden- 
borgian  mystic,  sometimes  a  physio-psychologist,  sometimes 
an  intuitive  reasoner  "who  acts,  sees,  and  feels  from 
within."  Many  such  mystics  there  have  been,  but  none 
who  had  in  anything  approaching  Balzac's  degree  the 
power  of  seeing  and  picturing  the  real ;  and  none  who  had 
like  him  the  novelist's  power  of  self-projection,  so  that 
could  give  to  these  ideas  objective  literary  form.  It  is  true 
that  in  doing  this  he  strained  the  novelistic  ( ^^«;r,  as 
Hugo,  in  the  same  period,  was  straining  that  of  t&e  drama. 
He  tried  to  make  it  serve  ends  and  carry  ideas  extrailepus 
to  it.  "Oppressed,"  says  Taine,  "by  an  exuberance  ol 
theories,  Balzac  put  into  his  novels  politics,  psychology, 
metaphysics,  and  all  the  legitimate  or  spurious  children  of 
philosophy.  Many  are  fatigued  by  it,  and  reject  Seraphita 
and  Louis  Lambert;  but  they  should  observe  that  these 
works  terminate  the  whole,  just  as  the  flower  terminates 
the  plant,  that  the  genius  of  the  artist  finds  here  its  com- 
plete expression  and  final  evolution ;  that  all  the  rest  pre- 
pares for  them,  explains  them,  presupposes  them,  justifies 
them." 

Thus  in  a  single,  though  the  most  important,  sphere  of 
metaphysical  speculation,  Balzac's  idea  of  the  Will,  as  sym- 
bolized in  The  Ass's  Skin  and  discussed  in  Louis  Lambert^ 
with  its  hypnotic  divagations  in  Ursule  Mirouet  and  in 
Seraphita,  finds  its  material,  realistic  expression  in  the  rela- 


1 86     A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

tion  of  Jacques  Collin  to  Lucien  de  Rubempr^,  whom  he 
dominates,  and  to  Rastignac  whom  he  inspires ;  and  so  in 
Balzac's  conception  of  social  love,  as  we  see  it  in  The  Two 
Young  Wives,  there  is  the  actual  counterpart  of  the  symbol 
contained  in  S^raphitus-S^raphita. 

But  though  surely  we  are  not  dupes  of  our  own  ingenuity 
in  speaking  of  the  "philosophy"  of  the  Human  Comedy , 
it  is  clear  that  Balzac's  system  is  neither  complete  nor  con- 
sistent with  itself.  He  sought  his  philosophy  of  life  by 
intuition,  and  gave  us  such  glimpses  of  it  as  he  received. 
The  result  is  hardly  more  unsatisfactory  than  the  systems 
that  have  been  elaborated  by  other  methods.  None  has 
yet  correlated  our  intuitions  and  our  perceptions,  perhaps 
none  ever  will.  The  interest  that  this  matter  has  here  is 
not  in  the  success,  but  in  the  effort.  Here  was  a  novelist 
who  at  least  tried  to  see  life  steadily  and  see  it  whole,  — 
who  tried  to  correlate  all  the  material  and  moral  and 
spiritual  factors  of  social  life.  And  when  a  man's  life  is 
given  to  such  an  effort,  shall  it  be  called  a  failure,  can  it  be 
called  anything  but  an  inspiring  success  when  the  great- 
est critic  of  France  in  the  last  half-century  can  say  of 
him :  "  With  Shakspere  and  Saint-Simon,  Balzac  is  the 
greatest  storehouse  of  documents  that  we  have  on  human 
nature  "  ? 


CHAPTER  VIII. 

PROSPER    M^RIM^E. 

PROSPER  MERIMEE  is  a  novelist  whose  place  in  the 
evolution  of  fiction  it  is  difficult  to  fix,  and  therefore 
peculiarly  interesting  to  study.  It  is  customary,  and  not 
unjust,  to  regard  him  as  the  successor  of  Stendhal ;  but  he 
had  in  him  elements  of  closer  relation  to  George  Sand  and 
others  that  suggest  Balzac,  while  perhaps,  after  all,  he  will 
be  found  more  closely  allied  to  Flaubert  than  to  any  of  his 
early  contemporaries.  He  became  intimate  with  Stendhal 
in  his  youth,  about  1823,  and  they  shared  in  many  sym- 
pathies and  antipathies,  especially  in  a  contempt  for  the 
ethics  of  the  bourgeoisie,  which  M^rim^e  expressed  with  an 
irony  keener  than  Stendhal's  and  lighter  than  Flaubert's. 
The  three  were  alike  in  their  objectivity,  and  all  excelled, 
though  in  different  ways,  in  psychologic  analysis.  But  in 
their  romantic  pessimism  M^rim^e  and  Flaubert  part  com- 
pany with  Stendhal,  who  never  wholly  threw  off  the  ration- 
alistic optimism  of  the  eighteenth  century,  while  M^rim6e*s 
cruel  irony  is  more  impassively  indifferent  than  Flaubert's, 
having,  as  Lanson  observes,  little  trace  of  the  eighteenth 
century  save  in  the  audacious  crudity  and  dry  scepticism  of 
his  thought.  With  George  Sand  he  shares  the  power  of 
picturesque  description,  but  he  is  too  cynical  to  share  her 
buoyancy.  He  has  the  sombreness  of  Balzac,  unrelieved 
by  the  latter's  idealism;    and  Ke  has  Stendhal's  morbid 


1 88     A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

dread  of  being  the  dupe  of  his  emotions,  which  in  him 
showed  itself  in  what  none  of  these  other  four  possessed,  — 
a  high-bred,  aristocratic,  polished  impassivity  in  his  social 
bearing,  and  a  corresponding  pellucid  but  cold  correctness 
in  his  style,  where  art  hides  art  even  more  effectively  than 
in  Flaubert.  His  indifference  goes  so  far  as  to  suppress 
studiously  all  appearance  of  interest  in  his  own  work.  He 
represents  the  most  highly  wrought  of  his  novels  as  the 
accidental  result  of  some  experience  of  travel,  and  in  one 
case.  The  Chronicle  of  Charles  IX. ,  anticipates  the  author 
of  The  Lady  or  the  figer^  with  the  suggestion  that  the 
reader  shall  choose  whichever  denouement  may  suit  his 
fancy.  Until  the  rise  of  Flaubert  he  was  the  best,  almost 
the  only,  representative  in  France  of  the  strictly  objective 
school  in  fiction.     It  is  here  that  his  peculiar  service  lies. 

M^rim^e  was  a  Parisian,  born  in  1803,  and  living  just 
long  enough  to  witness  the  bloody  setting  of  the  imperial 
sun,  which  had  lighted  the  last  two  decades  of  his  life  with 
a  sympathy  that  was  both  political  and  personal.  Of  his 
early  life  we  know  little  more  than  that  his  family  was  well- 
to-do,  and  had  on  his  mother's  side  a  strain  of  English 
blood,  to  which  his  countrymen  were  wont  to  attribute  a 
certain  austerity  in  his  manners.  He  was  educated  for  the 
bar,  and  entered  the  civil  service,  but  was  sufficiently  in 
touch  with  the  literary  currents  of  his  time  to  be  among 
the  first  to  achieve  notoriety  in  the  romantic  manner  with 
a  pretended  translation  from  the  Spanish,  —  The  Dramas 
of  Clara  Gazuly  published  in  1825,  and  The  Guzla^  a 
volume  of  pretended  translations  from  the  Illyrian,  in  1827. 
Neither  of  these  belong  directly  to  our  subject,  yet  both 
are  characteristic  of  the  man.  He  understood  the  creed 
of  romanticism  perfectly ;  he  could  say  its  shibboleth  with 


Prosper  Merimee  189 

faultless  correctness,  but  he  was  very  sceptical  of  the  value 
of  his  accomplishment.  As  he  tells  us  in  a  witty  preface  to 
The  Guzla,  written  in  1840,  the  creed  of  his  fellow-roman- 
ticists of  1827  was  "no  salvation  without  local  colour.  We 
meant  by  *  local  colour '  what  they  called  manners  in  the 
seventeenth  century,  but  we  were  very  proud  of  our  word, 
and  we  thought  we  had  imagined  both  the  name  and  the 
thing."  He  would  have  liked  to  visit  some  strange 
country  with  his  friend  Ampere,  and  as  they  had  no 
money,  the  idea  came  to  them  to  write  their  travels  in 
advance,  and  use  the  money  to  see  whether  they  had  made 
any  mistakes.  M^rim^e  was  to  take  the  literary  side.  He 
read  a  volume  of  travels,  another  of  statistics,  learned  a 
few  words  of  Slavonic,  and  wrote  in  a  fortnight  a  collection 
of  ballads, —  alleged  translations  that  deceived  the  scholars 
of  England,  Germany,  and  Russia.  "I  could  boast,'*  he 
concludes,  "  that  I  had  attained  '  local  colour ; '  but  the 
process  was  so  simple,  so  easy,  that  I  began  to  doubt  the 
merit  of  it." 

The  year  following  The  Guzla  saw  M^rim^e's  first  work 
in  dramatic  fiction,  The  Jacquerie  (1828),  interesting 
chiefly  because  it  showed  at  the  outset  all  the  qualities, 
except  polish  of  diction,  that  were  to  mark  his  work  to  the 
close.  These  were,  an  astonishing  command  of  language,  a 
remarkable  power  of  conveying  to  the  reader  the  spirit  of  a 
distant  age  and  foreign  scene,  —  in  this  case  the  medieval 
France  of  the  peasant  war  (1358),  —  a  predilection  for 
scenes  of  terror  and  blood,  and  the  peculiarly  cruel  vein  of 
irony  already  noticed. 

But  in  the  next  year  The  Jacquerie  was  surpassed  in  all 
its  qualities  by  The  Chronicle  of  the  Reign  of  Charles  IX., 
-  (le  Chronique   du  rfegne   de  Charles   IX.,  1829),  whose 


190     A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

central  scene  is  the  massacre  of  St.  Bartholomew,  which  to 
him  seems  to  illustrate  the  observation  that  all  morality  is 
relative,  and  suggests  that  "  the  decadence  of  energetic 
passion  has  been  to  the  gain  of  tranquillity  and,  perhaps,  of 
happiness."  The  story  is  told  with  great  verve,  and  is  full 
of  adventure,  of  murder  and  blood ;  but  there  is  shrewd 
historical  analysis  also,  with  picturesque  scenes  of  bygone 
manners.  The  irony  that  runs  through  all  M^rim^e's  fiction 
concentrates  here  its  brightest  flashes  in  the  sermon  of 
Pere  Lubin,  and  its  most  mordant  bitterness  in  the  spiritual 
brawl  of  priest  and  parson  over  the  bed  of  the  dying  Vol- 
tairean  Mergy,  while  the  novel  ends  nonchalantly  with  a 
request  to  the  reader  to  finish  the  story  as  best  suits  his 
fancy.  As  a  whole,  The  Chronicle  is  a  well-told  story,  but 
it  lacks  the  stylistic  finish  and  the  intensity  of  the  short 
stories  of  this  same  year.  In  the  evolution  of  fiction  its 
place  is  with  The  Jacquerie  in  the  brief  and  brilliant  series 
of  French  historical  novels,  inspired  by  Walter  Scott,  in- 
augurated by  Vigny's  Cinq  Mars,  and  drowned  in  the 
flood  of  Dumas'  fiction. 

M^rim^e  now  began  to  write  short  stories  for  the  Revue 
de  Paris  and  the  Revue  des  deux  mondes,  and  continued  the 
latter  relation  for  twelve  years.  The  stories  of  1829  and 
1830,  with  two  exceptions  first  published  after  his  death, 
were  gathered  in  1833  in  Mosaic  (Mosa'ique)  ;  in  the 
same  year  appeared  also  a  longer  story,  The  Double  Mis- 
understanding (la  Double  m^prise).  Several  volumes  of 
history  and  travel  followed,  and  M^rim^e's  next  contribu- 
tion to  fiction  was  Coloinba  (1840),  which  was  followed 
by  Carmen  in  1847,  and  by  another  collection  of  tales  in 
1852.  The  posthumously  printed  Last  Tales  (Derni^res 
nouvelles)  complete  his  work  in  this  field. 


Prosper  M^rimee  191 

The  close  of  1830  showed  M^rim^e  in  possession  of  all 
his  powers  as  a  writer  of  fiction.  In  the  preceding  year  he 
had  written  Federigo  (1829),  a  Neapolitan  legend,  that 
would  be  utterly  blasphemous  if  it  were  not  so  naively 
childish  and  so  curious  in  its  intermingling  of  classic  my- 
thology with  the  teaching  of  the  Roman  Church.  He  had 
also  written  The  Taking  of  the  Redoubt  (I'Enl^vement  de  la 
redoute,  1829),  a  story  from  Napoleon's  Russian  cam- 
paign, that  takes  us  in  ten  pages  close  up  to  the  cannon's 
mouth,  with  a  restrained  concision  that  makes  it  almost  a 
perfect  model  of  the  short  story.  And  if  here  his  style 
reaches  the  climax  of  his  powers,  in  Mateo  Falcone  (1829), 
his  irony  reaches  the  utmost  pitch  of  its  cruelty.  Here  is  a 
man  who  has  murdered  his  rival  in  love  and  yet  has  so 
Corsican  a  feeling  of  honour  that  he  kills  his  son,  a  boy  of 
ten,  for  failing  in  hospitality  to  a  criminal;  leaving  the 
reader  to  conclude  that,  when  civilisation  is  stripped  off, 
all  moral  action  is  the  result  of  prejudice  and  of  fatality. 
And  yet  one  hesitates  to  accord  Mateo  Falcone  the  supreme 
touch  of  pessimistic  irony  when  one  reads  Tamango  (1829), 
the  ghastly  story  of  a  slave-selling  negro  chief,  and  of  the 
slaver  captain  Ledoux,  who  insisted  that  on  his  ship,  the 
"  Hope,"  "  one  must  show  humanity  and  leave  a  negro  at 
least  five  feet  by  two  to  enjoy  himself  during  a  six  weeks* 
passage,  for  after  all  the  blacks  are  men  like  the  whites." 
This  genial  trader  who  varnished  his  fetters  is  massacred 
with  his  crew  by  the  kidnapped  Tamango ;  and  the  negroes, 
masters  of  a  craft  that  they  can  neither  sail  nor  steer,  die 
the  cannibal  victims  of  drink,  of  one  another,  and  of  starva- 
tion, —  all  but  their  chief,  whom  irony  reserves  to  work  for 
the  English  Government  on  the  fortifications  of  Jamaica 
till  fever  releases  him  from  this  "  liberty  at  six  cents  a  day." 


192     A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

Perhaps  more  bestial  horror  has  never  been  crowded  into 
so  Httle  room  or  recounted  with  such  cold  precision  as  in 
this  story. 

The  work  of  1829  was  completed  by  the  less  significant 
semi- historical  Vision  of  Charles  XI. ^  and  by  a  little  imita- 
tion from  the  Spanish  in  rhythmic  prose,  The  Pearl  of 
Toledo  (la  Perle  de  Tol^de).  Then  1830,  that  annus 
mirabilis  of  French  literature,  brought  The  Etruscan  Vase 
and  The  game  of  Tric-Trac,  To  this  year  belongs  also  the 
Spanish  Witches,  where  the  superstitious  shrewdness  of  the 
Valencian  peasantry  is  most  cleverly  and  romantically 
shown,  though  it  is  perhaps  hardly  equal  in  art  to  the  other 
work  of  1830. 

In  The  Etruscan  Vase,  a  story  less  well  constructed  than 
is  usual  with  M^rim^e,  love  and  then  jealousy  seize  on  the 
else  calm  and  clear  mind  of  Saint-Clair  and  lead  him  with 
an  inexorable  fatality  to  destruction.  In  his  proud  nature, 
inclined  to  retrospect,  ambitious,  distraught,  opinionated, 
and  reserved,  there  seem  many  traits  of  M^rim^e's  self. 
The  same  fatalism  of  crime  impels  the  gambler  to  fraud  in 
The  game  of  Trie  Trac,  "  When  I  swindled  that  Dutchman 
I  thought  only  of  winning  twenty-five  napoleons.  I  did 
not  think  of  Gabrielle.  That  is  why  I  despise  myself," 
says  Lieutenant  Roger,  who  was  else,  we  are  told,  loyal  and 
brave.  And  so,  generally,  in  the  stories  that  make  up  Mosaic 
we  have  tragic  terror,  but  not  tragic  pity,  the  freest  develop- 
ment of  passion,  such  as  Stendhal  had  sought,  with  an  even 
greater  affectation  of  indifference  and  moral  negation. 

Always  to  some  extent  an  enemy  of  the  conventional, 
Merimee  was  perhaps  least  so  in  77ie  Double  Misunder- 
standijig  (1833),  which  seems  rather  in  the  manner  of 
Bourget  or  of  Provost,  a  bit  of  pathologic  psychology.     It 


Prosper  Merimee  193 

is  the  story  of  the  unhappy  marriage  of  Julie  and  the  Mar- 
quis of  Chaverny,  whose  coarse  humour  grates  on  the  nerves 
of  his  wife,  as  appears  in  several  admirable  domestic  scenes. 
Chateaufort,  a  young  officer,  tries  to  profit  by  her  humour, 
but  she  feels  no  affinity  for  him.  Then  her  love's  comple- 
ment appears,  Darcy,  in  whom  it  is  said  M^rim^e  sought  to 
paint  himself,  with  a  Uttle  vanity  of  vice,  as  he  had  done 
perhaps  also  in  the  Saint-Clair  of  The  Etruscan  Vase.  To 
him  her  soul  is  drawn  like  a  boat  sucked  into  a  whirlpool. 
In  vain  does  he  reveal  himself  in  unfavourable  lights,  as  in 
the  cleverly  interposed  episode  of  a  rescued  Turkish  slave. 
She  yields,  she  hardly  knows  how  or  why,  to  his  cynical  and 
cold  fascination,  and  then  in  her  moral  revulsion  works 
herself  into  a  fever  of  which  she  dies.  "  Write  to  him," 
she  bids  her  nurse  as  she  lapses  from  consciousness,  "  write 
to  him  that  he  does  not  know  me ;  that  I  do  not  know 
him."  That  is  the  "  double  misunderstanding."  And  yet, 
concludes  the  author,  "These  two  hearts  that  misunder- 
stood were  perhaps  made  for  one  another." 

The  Souls  in  Purgatory  (les  Ames  du  purgatoire,  1834) 
is  a  development  of  the  legend  of  Don  Juan  de  Marafia, 
the  incarnation  of  materialistic  will  trampling  for  his  lusts 
on  the  honour  of  women,  the  lives  of  men,  and  the  love  of 
God,  and  then  converted  by  a  terrifying  vision  and  turning 
his  strong  will  toward  furious  penitence,  as  unspiritual  at 
the  last  as  at  the  first.  And  beside  him  is  the  enigmatic 
figure  of  Dona  Theresa,  who  loves  her  father's  murderer, 
and  though  herself  professed  a  nun,  consents,  as  though 
compelled  by  some  mysterious  force,  to  escape  with  her 
lover,  and  dies  of  disappointment  as  she  would  have  died 
of  the  realisation  of  her  hope.  Here,  too,  love  is  a  tragic 
fatality,  respecting  neither  law  nor  life. 

13 


194     A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

A  more  exquisite  work  of  art  is  The  Venus  of  Ille  (la 
Venus  d'lUe,  1837),  drawn  from  a  medieval  Latin  legend 
contained  in  the  chronicle  of  Herman  Corner.  This  Venus 
is  an  ancient  statue  of  Venus  Turbulenta^  in  which  the 
artist  has  impersonated  malicious  absence  of  all  sympathy 
and  the  irony  of  cruel  disdain.  On  her  bronze  finger  a 
youth  on  his  marriage  day  places  in  sport  his  betrothal 
ring,  and  at  night  she  comes  to  claim  his  body  and  soul,  to 
press  him  to  death  in  her  metal  arms,  herself  a  symbol  of 
imperious  passion.  The  story  is  old  in  its  outline,  but  in 
the  beauty  of  its  setting  and  in  the  skill  with  which  from  an 
opening  of  gross  and  even  humourous  commonplace  it 
evolves  and  maintains  an  atmosphere  of  terror  it  is  unsur- 
passed. First  the  scene,  the  weird  slopes  of  the  Pyrenees 
and  the  plain  of  Toulouse  below,  with  its  relics  of  an  irre- 
pressible paganism  contrasting  with  the  sordid  materialism 
or  the  bourgeois  comfort  of  its  inhabitants ;  then  the  old 
goddess  exhumed  to  be  witness  of  the  new  feast,  the  insult 
to  her  divinity,  her  anger,  her  vengeance,  and  the  strange 
veil  of  mystery  that  the  author  has  thrown  over  the  whole 
—  give  to  the  supernatural  the  illusion  of  reality. 

Colomba  followed  The  Venus  of  Ille  in  1840.  Since 
1835  M^rim^e  had  been  much  occupied  with  notes  of 
archeological  travel,  in  the  course  of  which  he  had  spent 
two  months  in  Corsica,  and  had  published  a  volume  of  his 
impressions.  Corsica  is  also  the  scene  of  Colombay  in 
whose  two  hundred  pages  there  is  probably  more  exotic  life 
than  in  any  work  of  the  French  language,  unless  it  be 
Rarahu.  The  book  is  still,  what  it  was  from  the  begin- 
ning, by  far  the  most  popular  work  of  its  author,  and, 
whether  true  or  false  in  its  local  colour,  it  certainly  produces 
the  illusion  of  reality.     To  the  strange  Hfe,  material  and 


Prosper  Merlmee  195 

moral,  of  the  Corsican  vtaquis  we  are  introduced  by  an 
artistic  prelude  that  brings  to  the  island  Col.  Nevil  and  his 
daughter  Lydia,  an  Englishman  and  an  English  girl,  treated 
conventionally  but  with  ironic  humour,  and  possibly  with 
more  justice  than  English  critics  have  liked  to  admit;  for 
M^rim^e  knew  England,  and  his  English  are  never  gro- 
tesque caricatures  of  Faiiglais  waterproof  et  mackintosh,  like 
the  jumping-jacks  of  Gautier's  fancy.  On  the  boat  with  the 
Nevils  is  Orso,  an  officer,  Corsican  by  birth  but  now  appar- 
ently wholly  French  in  spirit,  in  whom  Lydia  shows  a  frank 
and  quite  English  interest.  The  party  reach  Ajaccio,  and 
we  get  the  external  local  colour  while  still  moving  in  the 
conventional  world  of  social  ideas.  But  presently  this 
exotic  calm  is  disturbed  by  the  advent  of  Orso's  sister 
Colomba,  a  true  Corsican  nature  strangely  mixed  of  charm 
and  savagery.  She  is  beautiful,  graceful,  cunning,  unscrupu- 
lous, devoted,  morbidly  revengeful,  and  winsomely  loving. 
The  psychic  purpose  of  the  story  is  to  show  how  this  native 
ferment  will  plant  itself  in  Orso's  heart  and  permeate  his 
blood,  transforming  him,  to  his  own  surprise,  into  the  hero 
of  a  vendetta ;  for  Colomba  thinks  that  the  Barricini  have 
wronged  her  father,  who  is  dead,  and  with  that  fierce  family 
pride  that  is  the  dominant  passion  of  the  Corsican,  she 
looks  to  her  brother  for  vengeance  and  nurses  with  almost 
diabolical  malignity  the  old  spirit.  The  psychologic 
touches  here  are  so  firm,  the  graduation  in  the  notes  so 
perfect,  that  we  find  ourselves  accepting  as  natural  the  life 
and  modes  of  thought  of  the  bandit  Brandolaccio,  or  the 
feuds  that  divide  communities  in  fiercest  hate  and  intrude 
themselves  even  into  the  chants  improvised  at  the  burials 
of  the  dead.  "  I  must  have  the  hand  that  fired,  the  eye 
that  aimed,  and  the  mind  that  conceived  the  deed,"  she 


196      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

sang,  and  did  not  rest  till  the  sons  were  dead,  and  the 
father  a  senile  idiot,  shrinking  in  terror  from  her  reminder 
of  her  triumphant  vengeance.  When  Orso  has  killed  the 
brothers  who  had  fired  on  him  from  ambush,  it  seems  to  us 
as  natural  for  a  bandit  to  ask  pardon  for  regretting  the  vic- 
tims of  so  fine  a  shot  as  it  is  for  the  colonel  to  desire  a 
coroner's  inquest ;  as  natural  for  the  little  bandit  girl  to  an- 
nounce their  deaths  by  the  sign  of  the  cross  as  for  the 
Englishman,  first,  with  his  sense  of  law  to  have  wished  the 
double-barrelled  gun  he  had  given  Orso  at  the  bottom  of 
the  sea,  and  then  with  his  own  viking  blood  stirred  to  add, 
"  Brave  fellow  !  I  'm  glad  he  had  it."  Indeed,  when  the 
tale  is  over  and  Orso  is  taking  leave  of  the  freebooters  to 
return  to  civilisation  with  his  English  bride,  Castriconi 
seems  half  right  when  he  says :  "  Believe  me,  Mr.  Orso, 
nothing 's  comparable  to  a  bandit's  life  ...  if  only  one  is 
better  armed  and  more  sensible  than  Don  Quixote." 

Sainte-Beuve  compares  Colomba  to  Electra  urging 
Orestes  to  avenge  the  death  of  Agamemnon.  Her  joy  in 
conquering  her  brother's  mind  to  serve  her  passion  seems 
to  him  classic  in  a  truer  sense  than  Electra's.  Yet  the 
story  is  the  most  cheerful,  indeed,  the  only  cheerful  book 
of  M^rim^e.  We  pass  through  murder,  but  we  come  to 
marriage-bells,  and  the  irony  is  less  persistently  sardonic. 
His  pessimistic  fancy  habitually  seeks  escape  from  present 
conditions  by  creating  a  world  of  fiercer  primordial  pas- 
sions, but  he  has  never  treated  conventional  society  with 
such  genial  persiflage  as  in  Colomba. 

This  gentler  tone  characterises  also  M^rim^e's  next  story, 
Arsene  Guillot  (1844),  a  bit  of  tender  pathos  standing 
quite  alone  in  his  fiction.  The  central  figure  here  is  a  frail 
gijl  who,  on  her  mother's  death  and  the  desertion  of  lovers. 


i 


Prosper  Merimee  197 

attempts  suicide  and  dies  after  an  illness,  of  the  shock  and 
of  consumption.  During  her  illness  she  is  cared  for  by  the 
pious  Madame  de  Piennes,  who  had  become  interested  in 
her  through  a  meeting  at  a  church  whither  she  had  gone  to 
burn  a  candle  before  the  image  of  St.  Roch ;  for  her  mother 
had  told  her  that  this  celestial  patron,  if  placated,  would 
surely  provide  her  with  a  human  one.  Both  women  have 
formerly  enjoyed  the  affection,  platonic  or  material,  of  Max, 
who  meets  Madame  de  Piennes  by  Arsene's  bedside,  and  is, 
as  it  were,  united  to  her  by  Arsene's  dying  words.  Think- 
ing her  dead,  the  pitying  Max  exclaimed :  **  What  happi- 
ness had  she  in  this  world?  "  All  at  once,  as  though  reani- 
mated at  his  voice,  she  opened  her  eyes  and  murmured,  "  I 
have  loved ; "  and  while  of  course,  as  the  author  remarks, 
he  has  said  nothing  to  authorise  rash  judgments,  he  has 
said  that  on  Arsene's  tombstone  might  be  traced  in  a  lady's 
hand  the  words  :  "  Poor  Ars6ne,  pray  for  us."  This  con- 
clusion is  certainly  pathetic,  and  Mr.  Pater  regards  it  as 
"  ethically  acceptable." 

The  irony  with  which  this  tale  is  interpenetrated  is 
directed  partly  against  the  tendency  to  think  ill  or  even 
cruelly  of  the  socially  or  morally  unfortunate,  and  partly 
against  the  unnecessary  torture  of  the  feelings  inflicted  by 
well-intentioned  but  canting  piety.  The  little  story  is  full 
of  lines  that  cling  like  barbed  arrows.  At  the  opening  we 
read  of  the  artistocratic  who  "  buy  the  permission  to  pray 
to  God  apart  from  the  rest  of  the  faithful."  The  cynicism 
of  the  doctor  is  untranslatable,  but  among  the  motives  of 
Madame  de  Piennes'  interest  we  are  expressly  told  to 
reckon  "that  sentiment  of  curiosity  that  many  virtuous 
women  feel  to  make  the  acquaintance  of  a  woman  of  an- 
other sort."     To  say  that  hell  is  paved  with  good  inten- 


198      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

tions  or  with  women's  tongues  comes  with  M^rimee  to 
the  same  thing,  "  for  women,  I  think,  always  mean  well." 
Such  passages,  with  the  candle  of  St.  Roch  and  the  de- 
nouement, will  suggest  an  ethical  tone  that  seems  perhaps 
less  commendable  than  that  of  Colomba  or  of  Carmen^ 
while  in  its  art  the  story  yields  to  neither. 

The  reader  feels  more  at  ease  with  M^rimee's  morality, 
and  more  disposed  to  enjoy  his  art,  when  the  scene  is  for- 
eign to  our  time  or  mode  of  thought ;  and  as,  to  speak  of 
masterpieces  only,  Colomba  is  more  satisfactory  than  The 
Venus  of  Ille,  so  Carmen  (1845)  ^  ^  more  mialloyed 
literary  feast  than  Arsene  Giiillot,  The  posthumously  pub- 
lished Viccolo  di  Madama  Lucrezia^  of  1846,  also  does  well 
to  place  in  a  foreign  country  its  tragic  intensity  of  passion 
and  spice  of  diablerie,  though  here  the  author,  affecting  an 
indifference  that  suggests  Stendhal,  has  shown  us  too  much 
of  the  machinery  of  his  method  to  preserve  the  artistic 
illusion. 

In  Carmen  there  is  something  of  the  same  affectation. 
The  story  is  introduced  by  the  way,  as  an  incident  in  the 
researches  of  an  antiquarian;  and  when  it  is  over,  the 
author  goes  on  as  though  there  were  no  climax,  with  some 
erudite  remarks  on  the  gipsies  and  their  language.  This 
tale,  thus  indifferently  offered  is,  however,  the  capital  pre- 
sentment of  Mdrim^e's  determinist  morahty.  It  is,  as 
Sainte-Beuve  has  ingeniously  remarked,  the  Marion  Lescaut 
of  our  century.  The  satanic  power  of  love,  the  fatality  that 
drags  a  generous  man  from  folly  to  vice,  from  vice  to  crime, 
from  crime  to  murder  and  execution,  has  seldom  received 
so  concise  and  terrible  a  presentation.  As  in  Colomba^  we 
are  introduced  gradually  to  a  life  and  morality  so  strange 
that  it  might  else  remain  unreal>  and  even  with  this  precau- 


Prosper  Merimee  199 

tion,  while  Jos^  Navarro,  the  soldier,  smuggler,  highway- 
man, and  murderer,  is  made  acceptable  to  our  imagination, 
there  is  more  of  the  inexplicably  demoniacal  in  Carmencita, 
the  fascinating  and  savage  Delilah,  gipsy  cigar-girl  and 
smugglers'  spy,  than  there  was  in  the  Corsican  maid.  Once 
under  her  spell,  he  obeys  because  he  must.  His  struggles 
to  free  himself  involve  him  the  more.  At  last,  made  frantic 
by  her  alternations  of  tender  affection  and  faithlessness, 
swayed  perhaps  in  his  weakened  will  by  her  grim  prophecy, 
"  I  first,  then  you,"  and  hoping  to  the  last  that  she  will  beg 
for  mercy,  he  kills  her  and  surrenders  himself  to  certain 
execution,  still  doubting  in  his  prison  cell  whether  she  was 
a  poor  misguided  child  or  a  demon,  but  knowing  that  she 
has  destroyed  him,  body  and  soul. 

Of  that  dainty  bit  of  irony  Abbe  Aubain  (1846),  M^ri- 
m^e's  only  story  in  letters,  it  may  suffice  to  state  the  situa- 
tion. A  lady  living  in  the  country  to  restore  her  fortune 
by  economy  grows  intimate  with  a  young  abb^,  and  finds 
him  so  sympathetic  that  she  imagines  him  in  love  with  her, 
and  so  secures  him  a  promotion  that  implies  a  removal, 
which  he  shrewdly  or  naively  attributes  to  her  conscious  or 
unconscious  love  for  him.  Much  of  the  interest  of  the  story 
lies  in  the  food  for  psychological  speculation  that  its  incom- 
pleteness affords.  This,  too,  is  a  phase  of  literary  affecta- 
tion, but  one  that  is  easily  pardoned. 

It  was  apparently  about  the  time  of  Abbe  Aubain  that 
M^rim^e  became  interested  in  the  Russian  novelists  Pushkin 
and  Gogol.  On  the  latter  he  wrote  an  article  (185 1),  with 
translations  of  scenes  from  two  stories  ;  and  from  the  former 
he  rendered  four  tales,  which,  though  they  bear  the  stamp 
of  M^rira^e's  individuality,  interest  us  here  only  from  the 
fact  of  his  choice.    The  first,  The  Queen  of  Spades  (la  Dame 


200      A   Century  of  French   Fiction 

de  pique,  1849),  is  a  weird  bit  of  ghosdy  diablerie  and 
gambling,  culminating  in  insanity.  The  Bohemians  (1852) 
is  a  tale  of  savage  love  and  jealous  murder,  recalling  Car- 
men. The  Hussar  (1852)  is  a  phantasmagoria  of  witch- 
craft in  four  pages.  And  finally  The  Pistol  Shot  (le  Coup  de 
pistolet,  1856)  shows  the  intense  passions  of  a  semi-civili- 
sation in  which  admiration  for  skill  and  courage  overcomes 
the  deadliest  hate.  It  seems  then  that,  as  was  natural, 
M^rim^e  was  attracted  in  others  by  the  qualities  that  he 
himself  possessed,  —  by  the  intense,  the  exotic,  and  the 
exceptional. 

Of  original  stories  M^rim^e  wrote  but  three  after  the 
publication  of  the  stories  collected  in  1852.  These  are: 
The  Blue  Room  (la  Chambre  bleue),  written  in  1866; 
Lokis,  printed  in  1869;  and  perhaps  the  posthumously 
published  DjoumanCj  though  internal  evidence  would  lead 
one  to  place  this  wild  Algerian  dream  in  the  earlier  and 
more  romantic  period,  for  while  it  opens  with  a  clean-cut, 
realistic  description  of  gipsy  snake-charmers,  it  soon  passes 
over  into  a  weird,  fantastic  vision  of  serpent  caverns,  orien- 
tal voluptuousness,  and  inhuman  horrors,  much  more  in  the 
spirit  of  1830  than  of  the  second  empire.  The  Blue  Room^ 
a  mediocre  piece  of  rather  gruesome  fooling  in  the  manner 
of  tlie  last  century,  with  more  snickering  in  the  irony  than 
is  usual  in  M^rim^e,  seems  to  reflect  the  influence  of  the 
imperial  court  and  the  evenings  at  Compiegne,  but  Lokis 
carries  us  once  more  to  the  weird  lands  of  crime  and  pas- 
sion, interweaving  the  vampire  and  werwolf  superstitions 
of  the  past  with  modern  theories  of  heredity.  Here  a  son, 
whose  mother  before  his  birth  had  lost  her  reason  in  a 
bear's  embrace,  couples  the  nature  of  his  noble  ancestors 
with  brute  ferocity.     The  bears  have  an  instinct  that  he 


Prosper  Merimee  201 

shares  their  nature,  and  ghastly  presentiments  prepare  us 
from  the  outset  for  the  denouement  where,  in  excess  of 
love,  he  sucks  the  life-blood  of  his  bride  and  escapes  to 
the  beasts  of  the  forest.  The  tale  is  treated  with  admira- 
ble restraint.  There  is  the  same  artistic  preparation  here 
as  in  Carmen  and  Colomba^  gradually  leading  up  to  the 
foreboding  presage  of  the  soothsaying  snake-charmer  in 
the  Lithuanian  forest  morass  that  hurries  the  story  to  its 
dreadful  close. 

But  though  the  imagination  be  romantic,  the  style  here 
and  always  is  thoroughly  realistic,  and  it  is  by  this  art  that 
he  succeeds  in  making  Lokis^  Cannen,  or  Colomba  seem  to 
us  as  natural  to  their  environment  as  gloves  and  evening 
dress  to  our  own.  Thus  he  fascinates  us  by  the  extraor- 
dinary at  the  same  time  that  he  evokes  our  sympathy  by 
the  appearance  of  reality.  This  tends  to  give  a  certain 
malignity  to  his  ironical  scepticism.  It  has  been  said  that 
he  "  despised "  men  too  much  to  have  faith  in  their 
progress.  We  shall  not  look  for  moral  inspiration  to  one 
who  could  say  of  a  drama,  "  The  piece  appears  wearisome, 
although  immoral ;  "  nor  can  we  look  for  intellectual  in- 
spiration to  one  who  poses  as  a  dilettante  and  is  sure  that 
to  excel  in  any  art  "  one  must  be  a  little  beie.'^  No  doubt 
M^rim^e  toyed  with  morality,  and  no  doubt  his  fiction  con- 
tributed to  the  weakening  of  the  will  that  characterised  his 
generation.  But  as  an  artist  his  work  has  a  refined  dis- 
tinction that  is  the  more  charming  for  its  seeming  lack  of 
effort,  hiding  the  most  consummate  art  of  limpid  harmony. 
His  work  appeals  only  to  a  refined  taste,  and  to  that  it  will 
appeal  always  for  its  restrained  and  delicate  sense  of  pro- 
portion, so  singularly  lacking  in  his  naturalistic  successors. 
He  is  in  the  novel  what  Gautier  is  in  poetry,  the  represen- 


202      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

tative  of  art  for  art's  sake.  His  style  has  been  compared 
to  a  sheet  of  glass,  through  which  all  that  he  wishes  to  show 
appears  clear  and  distinct,  while  the  medium  itself  leaves  at 
the  first  reading  no  sensation.  Yet  if  the  critic  concentrate 
his  attention  on  this  style,  he  will  find  that  all  in  it  has 
been  subordinated  to  an  esthetic  purpose  that  produced 
its  full  effect  of  aristocratic  daintiness  and  elegance,  even 
while  unrecognised.  Among  all  French  novelists  M^rim^e 
is  pre-eminently  the  artist. 


CHAPTER   IX 

TH^OPHILE   GAUTIER 

THEOPHILE   GAUTIER   holds    an   important    place 
among  the  critics  of  France  and  among  her  poets, 
but  he  is  surely  most  widely  and  perhaps  most  deservedly 
known  for  his  work  in  fiction.     An  epigrammatic  critic  has 
said   that   he  is  the  only  successful  writer  who  gave   his 
whole  Ufe  to  writing  without  ideas,  feeling,  or  imagination, 
and  yet  with  no  love  of  commonplace.    Like  most  epigrams 
this  is  but  a  half-truth.      Whether  we  consider  Gautier's 
brilliant  books  of  travel,  his  volumes  of  criticism,  his  poems, 
or  his  novels,  we  shall  not  find  in  any  of  them  a  philosophic 
view  of  history  or  of  morals.     In  his  novels  psychologic 
analysis  is  either  absent  or  laboriously  futile.     He  has  not 
even  strong  imagination,  but  he  has  an  admirable  fancy,  and 
above  all  a  power  of  picturesque  description  that  is  unri- 
valled in  our  century.     In  his  literary  esthetics  he  stands 
apart  from  his  fellows  of  the  romantic  school.     Where  they 
were  seeking  a  Gothic  intensity  of  purpose,  he  sought,  so 
far  as  the  stress  of  his  life  gave  him  time,  a  Greek  perfection 
of  form.     The  romanticists  had  felt  strongly  drawn  to  the 
middle  ages.     For  him  the   centuries   between  Titus  and 
Louis  XIII.  were  a  blank.     The  romanticists  had  sought  to 
make    of    environment    and  of  description  in  general   a 
symbol  of  the  ideal  and  of  character.     Gautier  professed 
and  showed  for  this  the  most  supreme  indiiference.     He 


204      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

described  for  the  joy  of  the  spiritual  eye.  His  place 
among  the  noveUsts  is  that  of  a  sincere  and  true  painter 
in  prose. 

Gautier  was  born  at  Tarbes,  an  ancient  city  in  the 
department  of  Hautes  Pyr^n^es,  in  1811.  But  he  came 
very  young  to  Paris  and  was  educated  there.  It  is  charac- 
teristic of  all  his  literary  life  that  in  these  earhest  years, 
though  a  regular  and  close  student,  he  showed  more  interest 
in  archaic  and  decadent  Latin  than  in  the  classics.  He 
was  attracted  less  by  the  normal  than  by  the  primitive  or 
the  over-refined.  It  is  difficult  to  account  for  this  pre- 
dilection, but  easy  to  see  that  he  shares  it  with  many  of  the 
creatures  of  his  fancy,  especially  with  the  Albert  of  his 
Mile,  de  Matipin.  His  first  eifort  in  composition  was  an 
attempt  to  imitate  Musseus,  his  second  to  reproduce 
Coluthus*  Rape  of  Helen.  Already,  however,  the  authors  of 
the  French  renascence  began  to  interest  him.  He  revelled 
in  Brantome  and  Rabelais,  and,  thinking  that  he  discerned 
in  himself  a  taste  for  painting,  he  embraced  that  profession 
with  romantic  enthusiasm  and  contempt  of  commonplace. 

It  was  now,  at  the  age  of  eighteen,  that  he  met  Hugo 
and  was  presently  received  into  the  Cenacle  of  the  roman- 
ticists. Gradually  he  abandoned  painting  and  became  the 
centre  of  a  group  of  "  flamboyants,"  ultra-romanticists,  who, 
more  in  sport  than  earnest,  delighted  to  bait  in  countless 
ways  the  bears  of  academic  classicism.  He  tells  us  himself, 
in  his  half-comic  History  of  Romanticism ,  how  with  flowing 
hair  and  scarlet  waistcoat  he  led  the  fight  for  dramatic 
emancipation  in  many  Parisian  theatres,  and  especially  in 
the  famous  "  battle  of  HernaniT  This  early  period  was 
marked  by  the  publication  of  two  volumes  of  verse.  Poems 
(Poesies,  1830)  and  Albertus  (1S32),  which  showed  a  very 


Theophile  Gautier  205 

highly  developed  technic  and  a  power  of  description 
strangely  weird  and  minutely  realistic.  But  the  most 
characteristic  work  of  Gautier's  youth  is  his  first  volume  of 
collected  stories,  Young  France  (les  Jeunes- France,  1833), 
with  which  are  now  bound  eight  tales  alleged  to  be  "  humour- 
ous" that  call  for  no  comment. 

Young  France  is  a  book  easily  misunderstood,  and  many 
have  mistaken  its  irony  for  earnest.  Here,  with  the  non- 
chalance of  youth,  he  mocks  with  delicious  persiflage  both 
the  romantic  liberties  that  he  claimed  and  the  classic 
restraints  that  he  scorned.  In  The  Bowl  of  Punch  he 
shows  young  men  "  the  danger  of  putting  modern  fiction 
into  action,"  parodying  by  turns  Janin,  Sue,  Hugo,  and  even 
Balzac.  Romantic  medievalism  is  satirised  in  Wildman- 
stadius,  its  penchant  for  vice  in  Under  the  Table,  its  taste 
for  the  weird  in  the  nightmare  life-in-death  of  Onuphrius^ 
with  a  little  of  the  author's  own  mind,  as  we  shall  see,  its 
bourgeois  imitation  in  Daniel  Jovard,  and  the  real  banahty 
of  its  passion  in  She  or  She  (Celle-ci  ou  celle-1^),  the 
longest,  the  wittiest,  the  most  libertine,  and  the  most  thought- 
ful of  them  all,  for  its  apparent  licentiousness  masks  a 
strong  plea  for  sanity  and  realism.  And  lest  the  whole  be 
misunderstood  he  adds  to  it  all  a  preface  of  most  admirable 
fooling.  In  short.  Young  France  is  genius  laughing  at  its 
own  joy  of  life.  But  its  moderation  of  style  deceived  many 
into  taking  it  seriously  as  the  programme  of  the  ultra-roman- 
ticists. This  restraint,  even  in  satire,  was  no  affectation,  it 
was  part  of  his  literary  character.  It  showed  itself  in  dis- 
dain for  politics  during  these  years  of  intense  excitement, 
and  in  the  disengaged  poise  that  characterised  his  whole 
literary  life,  in  which  the  only  events  were  his  books  and 
his  travels  to  Italy,  Spain^  Russia,  Algeria,  and  the  East, 


2o6      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

T 

while  for  his  support  he  depended  to  the  last  almost  wholly 
on  journalistic  criticism. 

Gautier's  next  novel,  Mile,  de  Maupin^  was  the  frankest 
expression  of  his  hedonistic  creed  and  also  a  curious 
attempt  at  self-analysis.  Gautier's  Albert  is  Ren^  in  the 
last  phase  of  his  disease,  a  precociously  corrupt  enthusiast 
of  beauty,  whose  pursuit  of  a  fleeing  ideal  persuades  him 
that  the  dream  is  not  only  more  precious  than  the  reality, 
but  also  more  true.  And  Fortunio,  two  years  later,  is  on 
the  same  verge  of  confident  but  ever-deceived  hedonism, 
naturally  joyous  and  wholly  pagan.  These  two  characters 
stand  ethically  quite  apart  in  Gautier's  work,  partly,  no 
doubt,  that  he  might  not  offend  a  public  on  whom  he  de- 
pended, partly  too  because  life  had  brought  experience. 
Even  in  the  fiction  of  the  forties,  a  sort  of  moral  resigna- 
tion, though  not  a  moral  reconciliation,  succeeded  to  the 
hedonism  of  youth. 

Mile,  de  Maupin  is  an  exquisite  work  of  art,  but  it  spurns 
the  conventions  of  received  morality  with  a  contempt  that 
was  to  close  the  Academy  to  Gautier  forever.  With  a  spring- 
board of  fact  in  the  seventeenth  century  to  start  from,  he 
conceives  a  wealthy  and  energetic  girl  of  twenty,  freed 
from  domestic  restraints  and  resolved  to  acquire,  by  min- 
gling as  man  among  men,  more  knowledge  of  the  other  sex 
than  the  conventions  of  social  intercourse  would  admit. 
He  transfers  the  adventures  from  the  real  world  to  a  sort 
of  forest  of  Arden,  where  the  Rosalind  of  Shakspere  might 
meet  a  Watteau  shepherdess  and  a  melancholy  Jacques. 
Thus  he  helps  us  over  the  instinctive  repulsion  that  we  feel 
for  the  situation,  and  gives  a  purely  artistic  interest  to  the 
self- revelation  that  comes  to  his  heroine  and  to  Albert  from 
their  prolonged  association.     Various  forms  of  love  reach- 


Theophile  Gautier  207 

ing  out  for  an  unattainable  ideal  occupy  the  body  of  the 
book,  and  when  once  the  actors  learn  to  know  themselves 
and  each  other  Gautier  parts  them  forever.  In  its  ethics  the 
book  is  opposed  to  the  professed  morality  of  nearly  all,  and 
doubtless  to  the  real  moraHty  of  most,  but  as  Sainte-Beuve 
said  of  it :  "  Every  physician  of  the  soul,  every  moraHst, 
should  have  it  on  some  back  shelf  of  his  library,"  and  those 
who,  like  Mithridates,  no  longer  react  to  such  poisons  will 
find  in  Mile,  de  Maupin  much  food  for  the  purest  literary 
enjoyment. 

Gautier  calls  Fortunio  (1837)  "a  hymn  to  wealth, 
beauty,  and  happiness,  the  only  three  divinities  that  we 
recognise."  Ethically  this  book  is  open  to  the  same  criti- 
cism as  Mile,  de  Matipin,  but  artistically  it  merits  higher 
praise,  because  it  transplants  us  frankly  to  wonderland,  and 
having  set  us  down  there  makes  no  attempt  at  psycho- 
logical analysis  or  justification.  Fortunio  has  boundless 
wealth  and  has  been  educated  in  Oriental  luxury.  No 
material  wish  or  whimsey  has  been  left  ungratified.  He 
comes  to  Paris,  where  lavished  fortunes  enable  him  to  guard 
his  seraglio  in  Eastern  seclusion.  He  has  also  a  paviHon 
at  Neuilly  for  his  whimsicalities  and  for  his  pet  lion  and 
tiger.  He  is  the  masculine  ideal  of  a  sensualist  fancy,  a 
composite  of  Apollo  and  Bacchus,  and  if  he  mingles  in 
Parisian  society  it  is  only  in  that  undiscovered  corner  of  it 
where  everybody  is  rich  and  fair  and  young. 

The  social  and  personal  ethics  of  Fortunio  are  of  course 
false,  but  the  well-worn  theme  of  the  purification  of  the 
courtesan  by  love  is  treated  with  a  sentimental  nonchalance 
that  disarms  criticism.  It  is  surely  a  venial  sin  if  disgust  at 
canting  hypocrisy  betray  the  joy  of  youth  too  far  in  its 
generous  protest.    There  is  no  mortal  poison  here.    Satiety 


2o8      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

stands  too  obviously  behind  the  curtain.  But  the  art  of 
the  tale  is  as  perennial  a  joy  as  that  of  Aladdin  or  The 
Forty  Thieves, 

FortuniOf  says  Gautier,  *'  is  the  last  work  in  which  I  have 
freely  expressed  my  true  thought."  But  during  all  his  life 
he  found  in  short  stories  a  means  of  partial  self-projection, 
of  fixing  those  dreams  that  he  regarded  as  "  the  most 
enduring  of  the  goods  of  this  world."  There  is  something 
of  himself  in  all  his  heroes.  It  is  clear,  too,  that  the  de- 
mands of  conventionality  galled  him  more  at  first  than 
later.  His  next  volume  of  fiction,  the  Trio  of  Novels  (Trio 
de  romans,  1850),  is  distinctly  his  worst.  It  were  difficult 
to  imagine  a  story  that  should  unite  in  higher  degree  the 
improbable  and  the  commonplace  than  The  Innocent  Roues 
(les  Rou^s  innocents,  1846).  Militona  (1847)  contains 
some  bits  of  brilliant  description  of  Spanish  hfe,  but  its 
humour  is  grotesque  exaggeration,  and  its  fabulation  belongs 
to  the  childhood  of  the  feuilleton.  Indeed  the  story  is 
chiefly  interesting  for  a  sort  of  sub-acid  irony  of  protest 
against  its  own  banality.  But  the  restive  Pegasus  feels  the 
editor's  hand  on  the  bridle  and  checks  his  natural  instinct 
of  artistic  liberty.  "They  have  made  me  a  kennel,"  he 
writes  in  a  poem  of  this  time,  "where  I  watch,  pressed 
down  in  \.\\t  feuilleton  of  a  newspaper,  like  a  crouching  dog." 
And  one  feels  the  same  restraint  in  the  last  of  this  Trio, 
John  and  Jenny  (Jean  et  Jeanette,  1850),  where  social 
emancipation  is  danced  to  a  minuet  when  we  feel  he  would 
have  preferred  the  Carmagnole.  The  date  of  the  story 
gives  it  its  chief  interest.  Beneath  the  conventions  of  the 
feuilleton  we  catch  the  spirit  of  Sue's  socialistic  novels, 
and  of  the  second  manner  of  George  Sand,  with  some- 
thing of  the  emancipatory  spirit  of  1848  and  something 


Theophile  Gautier  209 

of  that  joy  in  luxury  that  marks  the  coming  of  the  Second 
Empire. 

The  volume  of  short  stories,  published  in  1 845  and  again 
in  1858  and  containing  eight  tales  besides  a  republication  of 
FortuniOy  is  of  a  different  tone  and  a  much  higher  artistic 
value.  The  stories  are  of  various  dates,  but  the  key-note  is 
struck  by  Foriunio  and  the  emancipated  inspiration  of 
romanticism  is  far  more  apparent.  One  of  the  tales,  The 
Nightingale's  Nest  i^Q  Nid  des  rossignols),  dates  from  1833, 
and  The  Dead  Leman  (la  Morte  amoureuse),  probably  the 
best,  from  1836  ;  but  as  they  were  revised  at  the  time  of 
their  collected  publication,  there  is  no  reason  for  insisting 
on  their  chronological  order.  Enough  that  taken  together 
they  represent  the  frankest  expression  of  Gautier's  ideas 
during  fifteen  years  of  enforced  literary  toil.  It  is  said  that 
he  put  most  of  himself  into  the  hero  of  the  first  of  them  as 
they  are  now  arranged,  The  Golden  Fleece  (la  Toison  d'or, 
1839),  and  certainly  its  hero,  Tiburce,  is  a  curious  character, 
whose  singularity,  as  Gautier  says,  "  had  the  advantage  of 
not  being  affected."  Many  things  that  are  said  of  him 
seem  to  accord  remarkably  with  the  impressions  of  the 
friends  of  the  author.  Like  Gautier,  Tiburce  had  been  a 
painter.  Like  Tiburce  also,  Gautier  "  would  stay  for  whole 
days  on  his  divan  supported  by  two  piles  of  cushions,  with- 
out saying  a  word,  his  eyes  shut  and  his  hands  hanging  '* 
and  "  troubling  himself  as  little  about  the  affairs  of  the  time 
as  of  the  news  from  the  moon,  preferring  to  do  nothing  than 
to  work,  wholly  detached  from  all  human  things,  and  so  rea- 
sonable that  he  seemed  crazy."  Much  psychological  self- 
insight  is  shown  in  the  analysis  of  the  artistic  nature  of  the 
poet-painter.  His  search  for  physical  beauty  had  made 
him  sceptical  of  moral  beauty,  and,  as  physical  dissimulation 

14 


2IO      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

was  more  difficult  than  psychic,  he  clung  to  material  per- 
fection. "  Art  had  taken  possession  of  him  too  young  and 
had  corrupted  him  and  falsified  him,"  so  that  he  had  be- 
come "bold  in  thought,  timid  in  action,"  loving  fiercely, 
but  loving  a  chimera  of  his  fancy  that,  like  a  captive  bird, 
was  ever  seeking  some  opening  through  which  to  soar  into 
the  blue  of  heaven. 

Now  the  psychic  result  of  such  a  state  of  mind,  as  Balzac 
well  shows  in  The  Hidden  Masterpiece  (le  Chef-d'oeuvre 
inconnu),  and  Zola  in  The  Work  (I'CEuvre),  is  to  place  the 
ideal  so  far  beyond  the  power  of  material  execution  or 
attainment  as  to  paralyse  effort.  Thus  here  Tiburce  so 
loses  himself  in  the  beauty  of  Rubens*  Magdalen  in  the 
"  Descent  from  the  Cross "  at  Antwerp  that  her  living 
counterpart  serves  only  to  suggest  the  picture,  until  Gret- 
chen  dissipates  this  phantom  barrier  to  their  marriage  by 
inducing  him  to  give  external  artistic  form  to  his  ideal,  and 
thus  wins  him  back  from  cerebral  to  natural  love. 

The  stretching  out  of  loving  arms  toward  a  figment  of  the 
brain  that  found  an  artistic  expression  in  The  Golden  Fleece 
pursued  Gautier  as  phantom  love  through  his  whole  literary 
career,  for  one  finds  it  in  his  youthful  poem  Albertus^  and 
it  persists  to  the  last  both  in  his  tales  and  his  novels.  In 
Omphale  (1834)  it  is  the  piquant  eighteenth-century  mar- 
chioness who  descends  from  the  picture  in  the  rococo  pavil- 
ion of  the  rococo  garden  to  bring  visions  of  the  regency 
to  the  young  bachelor,  until  the  prosaic  uncle  rolls  up  the 
canvas  and  sends  it  to  the  garret.  In  The  Dead  Leman^ 
(1836)  it  is  the  courtesan  seen  at  his  ordination  that  haunts 
the  country  priest  and  makes  his  life  at  first  a  desperate 
struggle  and  then  a  weird  double  existence  of  which  he 
hardly  knows  which  half  is  real  and  which  a  fantasy.     The 


Theophile  Gautier  2 1 1 

artistic  structure  of  this  tale,  the  gradual  initiation  of  the 
reader  into  the  realm  of  uncanny  spirits,  is  above  praise. 
The  wild  night-ride  that  brings  the  priest  to  the  bed  where 
Clarimonde  lies  dead,  the  watch  where  prayer  yields  to 
passion,  and  the  dead  lips  and  arms  respond  to  the  kiss  that 
gives  her  ghost  the  right  to  visit  him,  until,  nursed  vampire- 
like upon  his  blood,  she  turns  into  dust  when  touched  by 
holy  water,  and  leaves  her  priestly  lover  in  horror-struck 
regret  —  all  this  is  treated  with  a  restraint,  yet  with  a  power, 
that  make  The  Dead  Leman  one  of  the  great  ghost-stories 
of  the  literature  of  the  world. 

Again  we  find  Gautier  seeking  a  phantom  love  in  the 
grandiose  life  of  ancient  Egypt  or  Lydia  or  Greece,  enjoy- 
ing, as  he  says,  "the  high  contemplation  of  a  human  soul 
whose  least  desire  translates  itself  in  vast  actions,  enormi- 
ties of  granite  or  bronze,"  for  in  our  time  "  man  no  longer 
finds  scope  for  his  imperial  fantasy." 

Such  a  dream  is  The  Golden  Chain  (1837),  that  tells  us 
of  the  love  of  Ctesias  for  the  Athenian  Plangon,  who  would 
recover  in  his  affection  her  virginity  of  soul.  A  Night  with 
Cleopatra  (1838)  is  a  similar  dream  of  the  hero  of  low 
degree,  Meiamoun,  made  worthy  by  his  love  to  buy  with 
his  life  the  ephemeral  favour  of  Egypt's  queen  of  beauty,  a 
dream  suggested,  no  doubt,  by  the  "  Sleeper  Awakened  "  of 
the  Arabian  Nights,  or  by  Shakspere's  Christopher  Sly.  Very 
closely  allied  to  this,  though  with  a  happier  ending,  is  King 
Candaule  (1844),  where  Gautier  has  lavished  all  the  re- 
sources of  rhetorical  harmony  to  evoke  soft  Lydian  airs,  and 
all  the  colours  of  his  literary  palette  to  paint  the  grandiose 
luxury  of  the  last  of  the  Heraclidae.  On  the  story  itself 
there  is  no  reason  to  dwell,  for  it  is  taken,  even  in  its  de- 
tails, from  the  first  book  of  Herodotus ;  but  the  splendour  of 


212      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

the  descriptions  stands  out  in  sharper  outHnes  and  clearer 
colours  here  under  the  Lydian  sky  and  there  beneath  the 
sun  of  Egypt  than  in  any  work  that  had  preceded.  Here, 
as  in  the  more  trivial  Nightingale' s  Nest  and  The  Marchion- 
ess's Pet  Dog  one  seems  to  see  the  author  giving  himself 
over,  like  his  own  Tiburce,  to  an  unbridled  fancy,  heedless 
alike  of  the  demands  and  of  the  limitations  of  reality,  but 
with  a  most  exquisite  feeling  for  beauty  in  nature  and  in 
man,  with  senses  most  delicately  responsive  to  every  stimu- 
lus, and  with  a  power  to  convey  sensation  in  words  that  is 
most  rare. 

A  second  collection  of  stories,  ten  in  number,  followed  in 
1863,  though  the  greater  part  of  the  volume  had  been 
already  published  before  the  close  of  1852.  Here  the 
weird  and  uncanny  element  that  was  observable  in  the  best 
work  of  the  earlier  collection  gets  decidedly  the  upper  hand, 
and  shows  a  preoccupation,  so  common  in  the  sceptics  of 
hedonism,  with  occult  philosophy  and  spiritism.  Thus 
Avatar  (1856),  the  first  story  in  the  series,  busies  itself 
with  the  curious  though  quite  futile  question  of  what  situa- 
tion would  be  created  by  a  transfusion  of  souls  so  that  the 
spiritual  nature  of  one  man  should  be  combined  with  the 
body  and  mental  aptitudes  of  another. 

Less  attractive,  because  less  frankly  unreal,  is  Jettatura 
(1856),  a  story  of  Naples  and  of  the  evil  eye.  That  Nea- 
politan porters  should  shrink  from  the  cross-eyed  aristocrat 
Paul  is  probable  enough,  that  Count  Altavilla  should  do  so 
is  possible ;  but  that  this  should  worry  a  Parisian  gentle- 
man such  as  d'Aspremont  into  a  vague  terror  in  which  he 
thinks  himself  responsible  for  the  obviously  hereditar}"-  con- 
sumption of  his  fiancee  Alicia,  is  what  would  require 
greater  skill  in  morbid  psychology  than  Gautier  possessed 


Theophile  Gautier  213 

to  make  other  than  incredible,  unless  indeed  one  is  prepared 
to  agree  with  him  that  *'  dreams  are  as  real  as  reality." 

There  is  in  Jettatura  a  fine  duel  fought  in  the  ruins  of 
Pompei,  and  this  is  also  the  scene  of  Arria  Marcella  (1852), 
—  a  remarkable  story  of  retrospective  passion,  and  the 
most  vivid  of  all  Gautier's  resuscitations  of  antiquity. 
Phantom  love  is  again  the  subject,  and  again  we  feel  that, 
in  the  hero  Octavien,  Gautier  has  painted  a  phase  of  his 
own  nature.  Octavien  is  a  young  artist  who  lives  so  in  the 
realm  of  the  beautiful  that  he  loves  its  ideals  beyond  all 
reality.  He  "  could  love  only  outside  of  time  and  space," 
and  "had  composed  for  himself  an  ideal  seraglio  with 
Semiramis,  Aspasia,  Cleopatra,  Diana  of  Poictiers,  and  Jane 
of  Aragon."  He  had  loved  statues  too,  and  now  the  lava 
print  of  a  woman's  form  found  in  the  house  of  Arrius 
Diomedes  at  Pompei  has  filled  him  with  a  longing  to  trans- 
port his  soul  to  the  century  of  Titus.  In  this  mood  he  has 
a  vision  of  restored  Pompei  as  he  sleeps  amid  its  ruins. 
He  converses  with  a  courteous  citizen,  who  escorts  him  to 
a  play  of  Plautus.  Among  the  spectators  is  Arria.  She 
takes  him  to  her  home,  for,  as  she  explains  to  him,  "  the 
flame  of  your  thought  has  darted  to  me ;  my  soul  felt  it  in 
that  world  where  I  float  invisible  to  gross  eyes.  Belief 
creates  the  god,  and  love  the  woman.  .  .  .  Your  desire  has 
restored  me  to  life."  But  her  Christian  father  enters  to 
trouble  joy,  and  under  his  exorcism  Marcella  crumbles  back 
to  dust. 

Somewhat  similar,  though  less  highly  wrought,  is  The 
Mummy' s  Foot  (le  Pied  de  morale,  1840).  The  little  story 
opens  with  a  dazzlingly  minute  description  of  the  shop  of  a 
collector  of  antiquities,  where  the  author  in  his  search  for 
a  paper-weight  chances  on  the   foot  of   Hermonthis,  a 


214      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

Pharaoh's  daughter,  and  dreams  that  night  that  the  princess 
comes  to  seek  it,  talks  with  her  severed  member,  receives 
it  kindly  as  his  gift,  invites  him  to  visit  her  father,  and  takes 
him  through  marvels  of  more  than  Egyptian  grandeur, 
where,  "  holding  him  by  the  hand,  she  saluted  graciously 
the  mummies  of  her  acquaintance."  In  return  for  her  foot 
he  begs  her  hand,  but  her  father  declines  because  of  the 
disparity  in  age,  and  at  that  moment  he  awakes. 

Again,  in  The  Opium  Pipe  (la  Pipe  d'opium,  1838),  it 
is  a  dead  or  sleeping  beauty  that  revives  in  answer  to  his 
love,  and  here  as  there,  and  as  also  in  The  Hashish  Club 
(le  Club  des  hachichiens,  1846),  the  mode  of  the  story  is  a 
dream.  In  the  same  group  may  be  placed  also  the  feebly 
fantastic  tale  of  peri-love,  The  Thousand  and  Second  Night 
(la  Mille  et  deuxieme  nuit,  1842),  of  which  the  author 
says  in  mock  penitence  that  it  caused  the  death  of  the 
sultana  who  ventured  to  narrate  it  to  the  critical  Schahriar. 
The  other  stories  in  this  volume  call  for  no  notice. 

During  the  twenty-five  years  between  the  writing  of 
Fortunio  and  the  publication  of  the  last  of  these  short 
stories  Gautier  had  written  three  novels.  The  first.  The 
Mummy's  Tale  (le  Roman  de  la  momie,  1857),  works  to  a 
rather  dangerous  length  the  antiquarian  vein  of  some  of  the 
best  of  the  short  stories;  the  second.  Captain  Fracasse 
(leCapitaine  Fracasse,  1861-3),  is  described  by  the  author 
himself  as  "a  bill  drawn  in  my  youth  and  redeemed  in 
middle  life,"  and  is  a  uniquely  fascinating  romantic  fancy; 
while  the  third,  Spirite  (1865),  is  the  author's  last  dream 
of  phantom  love,  with  an  appeal  to  sceptical  credulity  more 
successful,  though  not  more  artistic,  than  that  of  Jettatura, 
With  this  novel  Gautier  fittingly  closed  his  literary  career. 

The  Mummfs  Tale  elaborates  into  a  novel  one  of  those 


Theophile  Gautier  215 

vivid  glimpses  of  the  past  that  were  rendered  so  wonder- 
fully in  The  Mummfs  Foot  and  in  Arria  Marcella.  But 
for  this  fuller  treatment  Gautier  lacked,  as  perhaps  the 
science  of  his  day  lacked,  adequate  preparation  and  direct 
knowledge  of  the  country ;  yet,  in  spite  of  this,  he  was  able 
to  produce  a  book  that  satisfied  the  antiquarians  perhaps 
better  than  it  could  the  literary  critics.  The  style  is  indeed 
marvellously  polished,  and  in  some  of  the  descriptions  of 
landscape  and  architecture  he  has  written  with  an  art  that 
he  himself  has  hardly  rivalled.  But  all  this  masks  a  psychic 
unreality  that  is  truly  exasperating,  and  the  story,  for  all  its 
elaboration,  produces  far  less  effect  of  illusion  than  those 
shorter  evocations  of  a  mysterious  and  ghostly  antiquity. 

Captain  Fracasse  had  been  announced  in  1836.  It 
began  to  appear  in  December,  1861,  and  it  would  seem 
from  the  preface  that  the  first  chapter  was  not  written  till 
1855.  Gautier  had  already  shown  his  interest  in  the  period 
of  Louis  XIII.,  and  had  proved  his  minute  knowledge  of  it 
in  The  Grotesques  (1844),  a  volume  of  literary  studies. 
Here  he  has  treated  the  same  epoch  in  the  spirit  of  1830, 
and  has  given  us  what  Sainte-Beuve  calls  "  the  classic  of 
romanticism."  The  novel,  however,  falls  into  two  parts  of 
nearly  equal  length,  but  very  different  in  character  and  very 
unequal  in  literary  value.  The  former  and  better  part  re-* 
sembles  superficially  Scarron's  Comic  Novel  (le  Roman 
comique,  165 1),  for  both  tell  of  the  adventures  of  a  band 
of  strolling  players  in  the  days  when  Moliere  was  of  their 
number,  and  in  both  a  beautiful  maid,  of  birth  above  her 
station,  is  made  the  centre  of  intrigue  and  of  romantic  in- 
terest. It  was  wholly  characteristic  of  Gautier's  artistic 
temperament  that  he  should  prefer  to  study  life  in  comedy, 
than,  like  Balzac,  to  note  comedy  in  life.     His  personages 


2i6      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

stand  out  with  wonderful  precision,  not  as  characters  but  as 
picturesque  figures.  Gautier  says  that  he  would  have  the 
reader  feel  "  as  though  he  were  turning  over  etchings  by 
Callot  or  engravings  by  Abraham  Bosse,"  and  this  is  much 
the  effect  of  these  harmonious  and  well-ordered  pages, 
where  we  see  men,  animals,  ruined  castles,  palaces  of 
princes,  and  dens  of  thieves  as  vividly  as  in  a  dream,  and 
yet  penetrate  as  little  beneath  the  surface  to  the  spirit  of 
the  individual  or  the  society.  Every  freak  of  fancy  is 
punctuated  with  a  realistic  detail.  This  first  half  of  Cap- 
tain Fracasse  is  the  most  complete  expression  of  Gautier's 
genius  as  a  painter  in  prose,  and  yet  the  death  and  burial 
of  Matamore  is  the  only  touch  of  true  pathos  in  it  all. 

Wholly  different  is  the  second  part,  a  phantasmagoria  of 
freakish  adventures  that  might  have  sprung  from  the  brain, 
though  it  could  never  have  flowed  from  the  pen,  of  Alex- 
andre Dumas.  French  critics  are  agreed  that  the  second 
part  of  Captain  Fracasse  '*  does  not  exist  for  those  of 
delicate  taste."  But  in  the  former  Gautier  has  caught  the 
spirit  of  Scarron's  Comic  Novel  so  completely,  and  yet  given 
to  it,  as  Sainte-Beuve  says,  such  a  bath  of  youth  and  art 
in  the  Castilian  spring  of  his  style,  that  he  has,  as  it  were, 
encrusted  this  modern  book  in  the  literature  of  a  long  past 
age,  and  his  novel  is  in  its  way  an  even  more  astonishing 
evocation  of  a  vanished  society  than  Hugo's  Notre-Dame, 
It  is  a  picture,  not  of  an  epoch  alone,  but  also  of  a 
romantic  ideal  that  had  slowly  matured  in  Gautier's  mind 
during  the  three  decades  that  separate  it  from  Young 
France, 

The  second  part,  however,  is  by  no  means  devoid  of 
interest.  Indeed,  individual  chapters  are  equal,  if  not  su- 
perior, to  anything  that  went  before.     He  has  made  the 


Theophile  Gautier  217 

Paris  of  Richelieu  live,  and  his  Pont-Neuf  is  almost  as  real 
to  us  as  that  of  our  own  day.  It  is  only  when  he  abandons 
description  for  action  that  his  work  ceases  to  be  unique 
and  threatens  at  times  to  grow  commonplace.  Most  ad- 
mirable, too,  are  the  scenes  of  criminal  life  in  that  den  of 
thieves,  the  Radis  couronnee.  The  whole  is  instinct  with 
the  nonchalant  gaiety  and  bizarre  joy  of  sense  and  colour 
that  characterised  the  "  grotesques  "  of  this  curious  reign, 
Cyrano,  Scarron,  Saint-Amant,  and  that  poor  martyr  to  his 
wit,  Theophile  de  Viau,  not  in  vain  the  namesake  of  "  Our 
Th^o." 

It  is  difficult  to  conceive  a  stronger  novelistic  contrast 
than  that  between  this  picturesque  evocation  of  the  past 
and  the  nebulous,  mystic  spiritism  of  Gautier's  last  novel, 
Spirite  (1865),  in  which  he  returns  to  that  phantom  love 
/  that  so  often  haunted  the  short  stories.  Here  he  has  not 
recourse  to  a  dream,  as  in  The  Mummy's  Foot  or  in  Arria 
Marcella^  nor  yet  to  the  Oriental  hocus-pocus  of  Avatar, 
He  bases  his  story,  as  Balzac  had  done  Seraphita  on  the 
Swedenborgian  teaching  of  angels  and  of  celestial  marriage. 
In  this  conceptibn  of  the  spirit  world  that  "  has  its  infatua- 
tions as  well  as  ours,"  there  is  a  suggestion  of  Dante's 
Beatrice,  but  we  know  that  this  love  "  enkindled  by  the 
\^impossible  "  and  gradually  passing  into  an  hallucinated  "cer- 
tainty of  future  happiness,"  where,  in  the  climax  of  passion, 
"  art  itself  is  forgotten  in  love,"  is  a  favourite  situation  with 
Gautier.  Still,  for  those  who  do  not  sympathise  with  this 
doctrine  the  idea  has  found  more  artistic  expression,  and 
such  readers  will  remember  Spirite  most  pleasantly  for  its 
beautiful  descriptions  of  the  Acropolis  and  of  the  Parthe- 
non. As  a  whole,  the  book  is  an  appeal  to  the  sceptical 
credulity  of  a  generation  in  search  of  a  new  faith.     It  struck 


21 8      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

the  popular  fancy,  but  gained  the  author  more  immediate 
fame  than  lasting  reputation. 

Indeed,  if  we  consider  Gautier's  fiction  as  a  whole,  we 
may  say  of  it  all,  as  of  Spirite,  that  its  supreme  excellence 
lies  in  the  dazzling  brilliancy  of  its  descriptions  and  in  the 
rippling  harmony  of  its  diction.  Gautier  lacks  insight  into 
character  and  the  touch  of  natural  sympathy  that  belongs 
to  the  highest  genius.  His  vision  is  fascinating,  but  it  is 
not  inspiring.  Let  us  recognise  frankly  his  limitations,  and 
then  let  us  surrender  ourselves  on  fit  occasion  to  the  delight 
of  his  plastic  art,  by  which  this  artist  of  language  builds  the 
soulless  fabrics  of  his  vision  with  a  vocabulary  of  unmatched 
resource  and  a  perception  of  the  delicate  nuances  in  words 
that  is  as  exquisite  as  it  is  unrivalled.  Like  Shelley  he  seems 
capable  of  creating  from  the  shapes  that  haunt  thought's 
wildernesses,  from  lake-reflected  suns  and  yellow  bees  in 
the  ivy  bloom,  pictures  so  clear,  so  clean  cut,  so  exquisitely 
finished,  that  they  have  become  things  of  beauty  and  joys 
forever  to  those  whose  eyes  are  trained  to  see  them.  His 
work  can  never  be  very  popular,  but  it  will  remain  for 
generations  far  from  the  limits  of  a  vulgar  fate.  In  epic 
imagination  he  is  inferior  to  Hugo,  possibly  even  to  Vigny. 
In  humour  and  charm  he  is  inferior  to  Musset.  And  yet  to 
those  who  love  his  form  of  literary  art  his  fiction  gives  the 
more  enduring  delight. 


CHAPTER  X. 

GEORGE   SAND. 

THE  most  fertile  of  the  contemporaries  of  Balzac,  if  we 
except  the  dubious  fecundity  of  Dumas,  and  surely 
the  most  facile  of  women  writers  in  all  time,  is  she  who 
was  Lucile-Aurore  Dupin  by  birth,  Madame  Dudevant  by 
marriage,  and  by  choice  and  fame  George  Sand.  To  those 
who  are  fascinated  by  the  problems  of  heredity,  few  men  of 
genius  offer  a  more  interesting  study.  On  her  father's  side 
she  was  descended  from  an  old  and  wealthy  bourgeois  fam- 
ily. No  one  more  eminently  respectable  than  her  paternal 
grandfather  Dupin  de  Franceuil,  the  tax-contractor  {fer- 
mier  gineral)  and  friend  of  Rousseau,  who  had  married  in 
middle  life,  a  daughter  of  Maurice  de  Saxe,  the  famous 
general  and  son  of  the  otherwise  famous  Countess  de 
Konigsmark  and  the  also  notorious  King  of  Poland,  Augus- 
tus the  Strong.  Her  grandmother  had  been  previously 
married  to  Count  Horn,  a  natural  son  of  Louis  XV.,  and 
thus  she  could  claim  a  sort  of  connection  with  the  royal 
family  of  France,  while  her  mother  was  a  plebeian  of  the 
plebeians,  the  daughter  of  a  certain  Delaborde,  a  bird- 
trainer  and  dealer  in  Paris,  herself  by  profession  a  dress- 
maker, quite  without  all  accomplishments  but  those  of  a 
native  charm  that  she  had  been  somewhat  negligent  in 
guarding. 

It  was  this  that  attracted  the  notice  of  the  gay  young 
officer,  Maurice  Dupin,  who,  much  against  the  will  of  his 


2  20      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

aristocratic  mother,  married  her  in  1803,  and  having  ful- 
filled his  mission  by  giving  to  the  world  this  child  in  1804, 
was  killed  by  a  fall  from  his  horse  four  years  later.  The 
young  Aurore  had  the  curious  fortune  to  be  "  born  among 
roses,  to  the  sound  of  music."  She  inherited  from  father 
and  paternal  grandfather  a  dashing  temperament  and  demo- 
cratic sympathies,  and  from  her  mother  she  acquired  her 
taste  for  an  adventurous  life,  while  both  influences  were 
much  modified  by  the  aristocratic  training  of  her  father's 
mother,  under  whose  care  she  remained  till  she  was  thir- 
teen. But  Aurore  continued  to  visit,  love,  and  admire  her 
mother,  and  so  was  brought  in  contact  with  conflicting 
affections,  whose  double-twisted  thread  can  be  traced 
throughout  her  life  and  her  works. 

Her  childhood  was  passed  at  the  ancestral  homestead  at 
Nohant  in  Berry.  Here  she  was  formally  instructed  after 
the  rigid  precepts  of  old-school  pedantry,  and,  with  a  demo- 
cratic independence,  proceeded  to  supplement  this  instruc- 
tion in  two  ways :  first,  by  the  sentimental  novels  then  in 
vogue,  especially  the  New  Heldise,  Paul  anaVirgimay 
Atalal^diVid  Corinne ;  secondly  and  most,  by  contact  with 
nature  in  this  French  Arcadia,  brooding  in  sombre  valleys 
over  the  memories  of  her  childhood  and  the  faint  echoes  of 
the  Napoleonic  tragedy,  or  chasing  butterflies  by  the  Indre 
and  learning  to  know  the  beauty  of  nature  as  none  of  her 
contemporaries  knew  it,  because  she  loved  it  more  than 
they. 

Thus  she  came  to  know  the  life  of  an  artificial  society,  of 
sentimental  fiction,  and  of  peasant  reality,  and  already  as  a 
child  she  was  putting  all  this  material  to  use  with  the  crea- 
tive instinct  of  the  born  romancer.  Encouraged  by  her 
mother  she  began,  like  Goethe,  to  tell  stories  before  she 


George  Sand  221 


could  read  or  write,  continuing  them,  just  as  she  was  to  do 
in  later  years,  until  her  fancy  wearied  of  the  situation  and 
the  characters  she  had  conceived,  and  then  dropping  the 
thread  for  another.  Thus  she  entertained  the  peasant  chil- 
dren at  Nohant,  where  also  she  invented  and  acted  little 
plays  with  her  sister  and  Ursule,  a  child  companion.  But 
when  she  was  thirteen  her  grandmother  seems  to  have 
thought  that  a  little  Parisian  polish  would  add  to  her 
chances  of  marriage,  and  she  was  sent  in  1 8 1 7  to  the  fash- 
ionable convent  school  of  the  English  Ladies,  where,  curi- 
ously enough,  both  her  mother  and  her  grandmother  had 
been  imprisoned  during  the  Revolution.  Now  the  effect  of 
this  convent  life  on  the  future  novelist  was  to  give  her  a 
deeper  idealism  and  a  comprehension  at  least  of  religious 
feeling,  to  which  till  then  she  had  been  wholly  a  stranger. 
She  had  come  here  proficient  in  shooting,  fencing,  and  danc- 
ing, but  ignorant  of  the  sign  of  the  cross.  She  took  at  first 
a  natural  place  at  the  head  of  the  rebels  to  discipline,  and 
went  by  the  name  of  the  Tomboy.  But  presently  she 
underwent  a  psycho-physiological  change.  She  had  periods 
of  sadness,  waves  of  undefined  longing,  until  one  evening, 
alone  in  the  convent  chapel,  her  spirit  was  touched,  as  she 
thought,  by  the  spirit  of  God  and  she  was  converted.  This 
change  was  sentimental,  not  rational.  Her  ardent  imagina- 
tion had  fed  on  the  rich  food  of  Roman  ritual  and  she  had 
cradled  herself  into  a  religious  dream.  So  the  practices  of 
piety  which  at  first  she  embraced  with  ardour  were  soon 
abandoned,  but  she  never  ceased  to  feel  and  to  respond  to 
the  religious  sentiment,  and  a  thread  of  mystic  idealism  can 
be  traced  through  the  greater  part  of  her  volumes. 

At  sixteen  she  was  withdrawn  from  this  hot-bed  of  arti- 
ficial emotions  to  the  deathbed  of  her  grandmother  and  to 


222      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

nature  and  freedom.  Again  she  walked  or  rode  by  the 
Indre  and  mingled  familiarly  with  the  peasantry.  She 
began  to  read  more  widely,  and  indeed  with  more  zeal  than 
comprehension,  letting  Chateaubriand  think  for  her  now, 
as  she  had  let  Rousseau  feel  for  her  before,  and  as  in  later 
years  she  was  inclined  to  take  ideas  ready-made  from 
socialistic  friends  without  quite  understanding  their  impli- 
cations. A  natural  result  of  this  was  mental  dyspepsia. 
She  had  gloomy  moods,  meditated  suicide  or  the  cloister, 
but  was  withdrawn  from  these  vagaries  by  legal  complica- 
tions attending  her  grandmother's  estate,  and  while  visiting 
with  her  mother  met  a  burly  country  squire,  Casimir  Dude- 
vant,  whom  in  1822  she  was  overpersuaded  to  marry. 

George  Sand  was  no  woman  to  be  content  with  a  mar- 
riage of  convention,  and  of  all  men  a  realistic  philistine 
must  have  been  most  uncongenial  to  this  free-minded  and 
warm-hearted  girl.  He  managed  her  dower  of  five  hundred 
thousand  francs  most  admirably,  but  he  neglected  her  heart. 
Still  they  lived  together,  "  suffering  each  other's  foibles  for 
accord,"  for  eight  years,  interrupted  by  travel  and  a  brief 
stay  at  her  old  convent,  and  they  had  two  children,  to  whom 
she  was  always  a  devoted  mother,  the  need  of  loving  being 
one  of  the  most  marked  traits  in  her  character.  But  almost 
as  prominent  was  her  independence.  She  could  not  brook 
the  subjection  to  a  Boeotian  squire.  In  1829  she  claimed 
and  obtained  the  right  to  live  for  considerable  intervals  at 
Paris  on  a  monthly  allowance  of  250  francs  that  he  made 
her  from  her  large  fortune,  and  she  endeavoured  to  eke  out 
this  pittance  by  decorative  painting  and  kindred  feminine 
arts.  At  last  in  1831  a  partial  separation  was  agreed  upon, 
and  this  was  made  final  in  1836.  It  is  important  to  dwell 
on  this  unfortunate  marriage,  for  its  humiliations  and  reve- 


George  Sand  223 


lations  completed  the  outfit  of  the  novelist  for  the  first 
period  of  her  development.  It  was  the  ferment  of  blighted 
hope,  of  discontent  with  the  society  that  made  such  mar- 
riages as  hers  natural,  that  penetrated  like  a  yeast  this 
talent  composed  of  intimate  knowledge  of  aristocratic  life, 
inherited  democratic  sympathies,  close  contact  with  nature 
and  its  children,  and  the  ideal  aspirations  kindled  by  re- 
ligious sentiment.  All  these  things  were  necessary  that 
George  Sand  should  write  even  her  first  novel,  Indiana, 

Almost  every  one  has  hidden  in  his  Hfe  the  possibility  of 
one  novel,  but  George  Sand  did  not  immediately  discover 
this,  and  her  articles  printed  in  the  Figaro  attracted  little 
notice.  She  had  already  written  a  story,  but  with  the  self- 
criticism  of  which  she  was  always  capable  decided  that  it 
was  unworthy  of  publication.  At  the  office  of  the  Figaro 
she  met  Jules  Sandeau,  a  young  lawyer  and  afterward  a 
novelist  of  some  note,  and  together  they  wrote  Rose  and 
Blanche  and  signed  it  Jules  Sand.  This  book  had  merit 
enough  to  attract  publishers,  and  in  1832  she  published  her 
first  independent  novel,  under  the  name  George  Sand. 

Indiana  achieved  a  great  success,  and  if  we  seek  the 
causes  of  this  in  the  criticism  of  the  time  it  will  appear  that 
it  was  because  men  felt  that  the  story  was  naturalistic,  im- 
perfect perhaps  in  execution  but  broadly  human  in  concep- 
tion. Here  was  no  romantic  medievalism,  but  the  persons 
and  manners  of  her  own  day,  living  a  familiar  life,  talking  a 
familiar  language,  and  feeling  as  strongly  as  was  still  pos- 
sible in  an  age  of  social  restraint.  It  is  well  to  stress  this 
point  here  at  the  outset,  because  George  Sand  is  as  much 
the  mother  of  "  naturalism  "  as  Flaubert  is  its  father,  though 
it  must  be  confessed  that  her  child  has  often  the  defects  of 
her  qualities.     To  this  matter  there  will  be  frequent  occa- 


224     A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

sion  to  recur.  As  for  Indiana  itself,  the  opening,  as  usual 
with  George  Sand,  is  better  than  the  close.  There  she  was 
on  familiar  ground.  She  could  find  in  her  own  heart  the 
blighting  ennuis  of  the  ill-mated  heroine,  her  expectations 
of  a  fairy  land  of  sentiment,  and  her  discovery  of  a  desert 
of  sordid  domesticity.  She  had  known,  too,  how  under 
these  conditions  the  pent-up  fire  of  passion  might  break 
a  way  for  itself  if  it  felt  the  attraction  of  a  kindred  sym- 
pathy, and  she  knew  also,  perhaps,  that  most  men  who  lend 
themselves  to  satisfy  such  feelings  are  petty  and  contemp- 
tible. Her  Indiana  is  a  nobler  Emma  Bovary.  Her  lover 
Raymon,  the  most  interesting  character,  is  even  more  con- 
temptibly seductive  than  Flaubert's  Rodolphe,  because  he 
has  perverted  a  nobler  nature.  Clearly  in  1832  this  was 
a  new  note  in  fiction.  Could  the  note  be  held  and  the  suc- 
cess maintained? 

That  question  was  answered,  almost  before  the  critics 
had  asked  it,  by  Valentine  (1832),  written  during  a  visit  to 
Nohant,  whence  it  drew  much  of  its  picturesque  inspiration. 
Yes,  George  Sand  had  not  merely  the  power  to  look  within 
and  tell  what  she  saw  there.  She  had  a  perennial  spring  of 
creative  imagination,  that  in  the  course  of  the  next  forty- 
three  years  was  to  pour  out  in  a  constant  stream  eighty-four 
volumes  of  novels,  ten  of  correspondence,  eight  of  memoirs, 
five  of  dramas,  and  leave  many  more  for  the  gleaner  in  this 
abundant  harvest.  It  is  impossible  here  to  speak  of  all  the 
novels  in  detail,  or  to  speak  of  some  of  them  at  all.  Nor  is 
this  necessary  to  the  present  purpose.  All  of  them  in  her 
first  period,  from  Valentine  (1832)  to  Mauprat  (1837), 
have  the  same  inspiration  and  the  same  general  character- 
istics. All  represent  projections  of  various  phases  of  her 
own  experience  and  re-assertions  of  an  intense  individualism. 


George  Sand  225 


They  are  types  of  the  domestic  novel,  the  lyric  cry  of  the 
misunderstood  wife.  They  are  transpositions  into  narrative 
prose,  sometimes  so  rhetorical  and  warm  as  to  be  almost 
rhythmic,  of  the  romantic  dramas  of  Hugo  and  the  roman- 
tic odes  of  Musset.  Their  intense  assertion  of  indepen- 
dent personality  is  of  their  time,  and  finds  in  that  time  a 
passionate  echo  and  a  revolt  as  passionate.  To  some  she 
was  in  these  years  "the  true  priestess,  ...  an  inspired 
bacchante  who  leads  in  our  century  the  choir  of  intelli- 
gences." To  others  she  seemed  profoundly  immoral,  anti- 
social. The  battle  over  Valentine^  where  also  the  beginning 
is  good  and  the  end  weak,  reached  its  height  on  the  appear- 
ance of  Lelia  in  1833,  a  story  produced  under  conditions 
public  and  personal  that  tended  to  make  it  a  gloomy  cry  of 
despairing  genius,  beating  its  wings  against  the  confining  bars 
of  social  law  and  custom.  In  the  political  world  the  revolu- 
tion of  1830  had  aroused  more  hopes  than  it  had  justified; 
the  cholera  of  1832,  the  failure  of  the  emeutes  of  1833,  and 
the  Polish  massacres  of  that  year  had  caused  a  deep  dis- 
couragement among  liberals  everywhere;  Saint-Simon  and 
Fourier  had  shown  to  women  a  bright  horizon  that  had 
roused  a  general  restlessness  among  them  both  in  France  and 
Germany  ;  and  meantime  her  own  domestic  life  had  brought 
her  many  disillusions.  "  She  was  at  this  time,"  says  Sainte- 
Beuve,  "  in  a  vein  of  bitterness  and  social  misanthropy,  on 
the  eve  of  breaking  an  old  tie,  in  a  true  moral  isolation," 
seeking  for  some  heart  worthy  to  receive  the  outpourings  of 
her  overflowing  affection,  and  presently  to  find  it,  as  she 
thought,  in  the  poet  Musset.  For  the  moment,  however, 
she  had  lost  faith  not  only  in  marriage  but  in  love  itself, 
and  the  waters  of  bitterness  gush  with  geyser  energy  in 
the  sombre  periods  of  this  eloquent  poem  in  prose,  the 


226     A  Century  of  French  Fiction 


revolt  of  passion  bruised  by  masculine  egoism,  nauseated 
by  masculine  fatuousness,  despairing  of  finding  any  object 
worthy  of  its  devotion,  and  bursting  at  times  in  its  enforced 
sterility  of  heart  into  imprecations  of  society  and  of  creation 
itself. 

Lelia  marks  a  climax  in  this  Byronic,  dithyrambic  declam- 
atory vein,  from  \s\{\qS\  Jacques  (1834)  and  Leone  Leoni 
(1835)  afford  a  descent  to  earth.  The  former  is  a  sort  of 
gospel  of  free  love.  The  husband  here  is  no  longer  the 
unsympathetic  boor  of  Indiana  nor  the  unsympathetic  gen- 
tleman of  Valentine.  He  is  a  hero  of  magnanimity,  who 
makes  way  for  the  lover  by  considerately  killing  himself. 
The  lover,  too,  who  in  Indiana  had  been  so  ingrained  a  hypo- 
crite as  to  be  hardly  conscious  of  his  hypocrisy,  and  in  Val- 
entine had  become  an  attractive  and  not  altogether  ignoble 
gentleman,  is  in  Jacqties  a  hero  as  capable  of  passion  as 
Madame  Dudevant,  who  is  throughout  the  heroine. 

This  wild  assertion  of  the  divine  right  of  passion  was  the 
herald  of  a  long  line  of  similar  novels  in  France  and  Ger- 
many, that  continued  to  remind  the  author  of  her  youthful 
aberrations  long  after  she  had  herself  outgrown  them.  For 
already  Z^^;2(?  Leoni  (1835)  though  it  may  place  passion 
above  reason  shows  an  attempt  at  serious  psychic  analysis, 
while  her  work  during  1834  had  been  made,  as  she  says,  to 
sell  rather  than  to  read.  This  change  had  been  wrought  in 
her  by  Musset,  with  whom  she  had  made  a  journey  to  Italy 
in  the  winter  of  1833-4  that  has  been  the  subject  of  numer- 
ous books  and  of  acrimonious  controversy.  We  are  con- 
cerned with  it  here  only  as  it  affected  her  novelistic  talent. 
It  gave  her  her  first  passionate  love,  and  her  first  realisation 
of  the  inadequacy  of  passion  as  a  rule  of  life.  "I  am 
deadly  sad,"  she  writes  to  Sainte-Beuve  on  her  return  to 


George  Sand  227 


Paris ;  "  I  do  not  know  if  I  shall  survive  this  terrible  crisis  of 
the  thirtieth  year."  Both  she  and  Miisset  were  racked  with 
like  pains,  but  they  poisoned  his  nature  while  they  greatly 
deepened  hers.  In  She  and  He  (Elle  et  lui,  1859),  the 
novelistic  precipitate  of  this  journey,  she  says:  "  God  makes 
some  men  of  genius  to  wander  in  the  tempest  and  to  create 
pain.  I  studied  you  in  your  light  and  in  your  darkness,  and 
know  that  you  are  not  to  be  weighed  in  balances  like  other 
men."  And  so  she  presently  recovered  her  self-poise. 
New  friends  began  to  gather  about  her,  Balzac,  Liszt,  Dela- 
croix, and  the  philosophic  priest  Lamennais.  But  though 
calmed  she  felt  morally  exhausted.  In  February  of  1835 
she  sought  refuge  at  Nohant  and  in  the  next  year  she 
arranged  a  final  separation  from  her  husband  that  left  her  a 
woman  of  independent  fortune. 

Such  conditions  were  most  unfavourable  to  literary  pro- 
duction, but  the  effect  appears  less  in  the  quantity  than  the 
quality.  Greater  depth  and  tenderness  come  with  1835, 
the  former  in  Leone  Leant,  the  latter  in  Andre^  which  is  the 
idyllic  prelude  to  Devil's  Pool  (1846)  and  Little  Fadette 
(1849).  Then  in  1836  the  result  of  separation  from  her 
husband  appears  in  the  more  balanced  art  and  firmer  draw- 
ing of  character  of  Mauprat,  in  which  this  first  individualis- 
tic period  of  her  genius  reaches  its  full  development ;  for 
The  Last  Aldini  (la  Derniere  Aldini,  1838),  The  Master 
Mosaists  (les  Maitres  mosaistes,  1838)  and  The  Companion 
of  the  Tour  de  France  (le  Compagnon  de  la  Tour  de  France, 
1840)  show  the  arrested  development  that  marks  a  coming 
transformation  in  her  thought  and  fiction. 

Individualism,  says  Bruneti^re,  culminates  always  in  a 
negation  of  order  and  social  justice.  In  George  Sand 
prosperity,  fame,  travel  modified  the  generous  enthusiasms 


228      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

of  youth.  The  mother's  point  of  view  is  not  that  of  the 
bride.  As  early  as  1836  she  tells  her  son  that  ambition 
should  not  be  for  self,  but  for  society.  The  sentimental 
socialism  of  Lamennais,  Barb^s,  and  others  begins  to  attract 
her  enthusiastic  assent.  There  is  some  timid  socialistic 
kite-flying  in  The  Companion  of  the  Tour  de  France,  and  in 
Spiridion  (1840)  there  is  a  brief  and  futile  effort  to  seek 
the  solution  of  society's  troubles  in  mystic  interpenetration 
of  politics  and  religion.  Then  the  new  sympathies  fire 
completely  her  genius,  and  for  eight  years  she  dazzles  the 
world  with  brilliant  pleas  for  the  ideals  of  the  revolution 
of  1848. 

Life  at  Nohant,  with  the  stimulus  of  frequent  visits  to 
Paris,  proved  very  favourable  to  steady  and  rapid  pro- 
duction. Between  1841  and  1848  she  issued  forty-four 
volumes,  all  more  or  less  tinged  with  this  general  warmth 
of  universal  sympathy,  where  aristocratic  dames  marry 
artisans,  and  mechanics  refuse  the  proffered  hand  of  wealth 
and  nobility.  The  best  of  these  novels  are  Consuelo 
(1843)  and  The  Countess  of  Rudolstadt  (1844)  ;  the  most 
radical  are  Mr.  Antony's  Fault  (le  P^ch^  de  M.  Antoine, 
1847)  and  The  Miller  of  Angibault  (le  Meunier  d'Angi- 
bault,  1845).  None  of  them  can  be  read  with  satisfaction 
to-day.  In  them  all  the  heart  is  right,  but  the  head  is 
wrong.  They  are  declamatory  and  exceedingly  uneven. 
But  they  seem  very  attractive  to  those  minds,  numerous 
after  every  political  convulsion,  whose  thirst  for  truth  is  not 
satisfied  by  philosophy  or  religion,  and  who  are  as  sure  as 
Hamlet  that  the  world  is  out  of  joint,  and  as  powerless  to 
set  it  right.  And  these  novels  are  also  very  significant  in 
the  evolution  of  fiction  both  at  home  and  abroad.  George 
Sand  was  among  the  first  to  see  that  a  sympathetic  study 


George  Sand  229 


of  the  lower  classes  would  give  new  life  to  romanticism, 
which  was  in  its  nature  democratic  and  even,  as  she  said, 
"revolutionary."  And  so  these  studies  of  artisan  and 
peasant  life,  beginning  in  1840,  and  thus  preceding  Balzac's 
Peasants,  or  Sue's  Mysteries  of  Paris,  or  Hugo's  Mis^-ables, 
are  an  essential  prelude  to  the  topsy-turvy  naturalism  of 
Zola.  That  is  the  historical  significance  of  novels  that 
widened  their  author's  heart  and  chastened  her  sympathies 
for  the  more  artistic  and  wholly  delightful  work  of  her  third 
period,  when  the  revolution  of  1848  and  its  collapse  had 
given  to  her  socialistic  dream  a  rude  awakening. 

In  February  of  that  year  she  had  been  drawn  into  active 
journalistic  life,  but  the  obvious  incapacity  of  the  people  for 
self-government  soon  cooled  her  enthusiasm,  and  after  the 
accession  of  Napoleon  she  withdrew  once  more  to  her 
country  estate  at  Nohant  in  Berry,  where  she  resided  almost 
continuously  until  her  death  in  June,  1876.  During  all 
this  time  her  pen  was  ceaselessly  busy,  and  the  complete 
bibliography  of  her  writing,  from  1849  to  her  death,  counts 
one  hundred  and  thirty-five  volumes,  some  of  them  of 
course  smaller  than  those  in  which  her  works  are  published 
to-day. 

Her  later  manner  shows  itself  first  in  studies  of  the 
peasantry  of  Berry,  of  which  the  spirit  and  manner  had 
been  anticipated  in  the  preceding  period  hy  Jeanne  (1844) 
and  by  The  Devil's  Pool  (la  Mare  au  diable,  1846),  while 
in  Teverino  (1846)  she  seems  to  have  sought  relief  from 
her  socialistic  friends  by  a  flight  into  fairyland.  Of  the 
country  idyls,  the  most  noteworthy  beside  the  ever  exquisite 
DeviVs  Pool  2iXQ  Francois  le  Champi  (1849),  Little  Fadette 
(la  Petite  Fadette,  1849),  and  The  Bell  Ringers  (les  Maitres 
sonneurs,  1853).     It   is   difficult  to  speak  too  strongly  of 


230      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

the  idyllic  charm  and  gentle  sympathy  with  the  children 
of  nature  that  pervades  these  books  and  makes  them 
redolent  with  the  scent  of  wild  thyme  and  sage.  Love  had 
pulsed  in  her  first  novels,  the  passion  for  humanity  in  the 
socialistic  tales.  Here  was  the  third  element,  foreshad- 
owed since  Valentine^  the  sentiment  of  nature,  that  led  her 
to  observe  with  loving  care  the  material  details  and  the 
revelations  of  soul  in  life  among  the  lowly.  If  she  still 
moralised  as  in  the  socialistic  novels,  it  was  now  as  an 
optimistic  reaUst,  admitting,  as  she  says,  "  the  right  of  the 
Hterary  artist  to  sound  and  exhibit  the  plague  spots  of 
society,"  as  Balzac  had  done,  but  feeling  that  fear  increases 
rather  than  heals  egoism,  and  believing  that  the  mission  of 
her  art  was  "  a  mission  of  sentiment  and  of  love."  More 
and  more  from  year  to  year  this  habit  of  thought  built  up 
in  her  a  more  objective  esthetic  mind,  until  in  1867  we 
find  her  writing  that  "  the  whole  secret  of  the  beautiful,  the 
only  truth,  love,  art,  enthusiasm,  and  faith "  is  in  loving 
persons  for  what  they  are  in  themselves,  and  not  for  any 
reflection  of  one's  self  that  one  finds  in  them.  But  that  is 
to  assert  the  impersonality  of  art  in  its  noblest  form. 

In  an  introduction  to  The  Devil's  Fool  the  author  says 
she  is  a  realistic  optimist,  but  the  tale  has  in  it  nothing  of 
Utopia.  It  is  a  dehcious  idyl  of  a  ride  by  day  and  night, 
and  of  an  often  interrupted  conversation  in  which  Marie 
reveals  her  simple,  loving  heart  to  the  honest  Germain,  and 
reaps  the  fruit  of  quickly  ripening  seed  sown  quite  uncon- 
sciously. It  is  a  trifle  and  yet  a  masterpiece  of  rustic 
poetry,  a  work  of  perfect  nature. 

Again  before  1848  she  struck  the  same  note  in  Franqois 
le  Champi  (printed  in  1849).  Here  as  in  The  DeviPs  Fool 
it  is  a  Uttle  boy  that  brings  his  elders  to  a  reaUsation  of  their 


George  Sand  231 


love,  and  the  whole  is  treated  with  a  most  dainty  charm,  as 
though  she  truly  loved  the  peasants  of  whom  she  wrote. 
Then  the  collapse  of  socialism  in  1849  g^^e  her  back 
wholly  to  her  art.  She  sees  that  "  direct  allusions  to  pre- 
sent ills,  the  appeal  to  fermenthig  passions,  is  not  the  road 
to  salvation.  Better  a  gentle  song,  a  rustic  pipe,  a  tale  to 
lull  little  children  without  fear  or  pain,  than  the  spectacle 
of  real  woes  reinforced  and  darkened  by  the  colours  of 
fiction."  Thus  Little  Fadette  becomes,  as  Caro  says,  the 
first  pledge  of  the  reconciliation  of  Madame  Sand  with  her 
genius.  We  can  see  that  she  has  been  reading  to  good 
effect  her  Virgil  in  the  depths  of  Berry.  As  in  The  Devil's 
Pool  she  had  endeavoured  to  render  the  charm  of  the 
prattle  of  childhood,  so  here  she  goes  a  step  further  in  an 
endeavour  to  convey  the  flavour  of  rustic  language,  putting 
her  story  into  the  mouth  of  a  countryman,  but  modifying 
his  words  so  that  she  might  seem,  as  she  put  it,  "  to  speak 
clearly  for  a  Parisian,  simply  for  a  peasant."  Our  modern 
dialect  writers  have  more  courage,  but  few  have  attained 
such  a  happy  result  in  what  is  at  best  an  artificial  rather 
than  an  artistic  excellence.  The  psychology  of  childhood, 
both  in  the  twins  Sylvanet  and  Landry  and  in  the  shrewd 
little  Fanchon  Fadet,  poor  yet  proud,  who  passes  for  ugly 
till  metamorphosed  by  her  love,  is  admirably  seized  and 
developed  with  precision  and  yet  with  sympathetic  pathos, 
and  we  find  the  same  traits  also  in  The  Bell  Ringers  (les 
Maitres  sonneurs,  1853). 

But  this  bucolic  genre,  however  charming,  could  not 
long  afford  scope  for  her  genius.  She  could  not  let  slum- 
ber in  her  those  stronger  and  more  intense  feelings  that  had 
found  expression  in  her  earlier  novels.  But  now  these 
qualities  were  to  show  themselves  no  longer  obscured  by 


232      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

the  smoke  of  passion,  but  burning  clear  and  bright  in  the 
serener  air  of  the  rich  experiences  of  half  a  century.  She 
turned  first  from  the  pastoral  to  the  drama,  whither  we  will 
not  follow  her,  and  then  in  the  novel,  which  was  to  her  the 
more  natural  genre,  she  took  all  society  for  her  theme,  and 
wrote  a  number  of  stories  excellently  told  and  quite  free 
from  social  or  political  preoccupations.  She  tried  historical 
novels  also,  returned  to  the  working  classes  in  The  Black 
City  (la  Ville  noire,  1861),  and  in  the  same  year  gave  us 
her  best  novel  of  aristocratic  life  in  The  Marquis  of 
Villemer,  having  in  the  preceding  year  published  her  most 
curious  psychological  novel,  Jean  de  la  Roche. 

On  the  whole  it  is  perhaps  these  last  with  Mile,  la 
Quintinie  (1863)  that  best  unite  the  various  elements  that 
make  up  her  literary  genius.  The  subject  of  Jean  de  la 
Roche  is  that  studied  with  such  marvellous  acuteness  in 
Zola's  Page  of  Love ^  the  morbid  jealousy  of  a  child,  in  this 
case  a  brother,  in  Zola's  a  daughter,  that  bars  the  course  of 
normal  love.  This  morbid  passion  and  its  physical  accom- 
paniments are  acutely  dissected,  and  in  their  gradations 
serve  as  the  mainspring  of  an  action  by  which  two  noble 
hearts  are  tempered  and  strengthened.  The  whole  work 
breathes  a  tender  and  hopeful  magnanimity,  and  the  close  is 
more  deftly  managed  and  more  artistically  satisfying  than 
is  usual  with  George  Sand. 

The  Marquis  of  Villemer  has  for  its  heroine  Caroline  de 
Saint-Geneix,  lady-companion  to  the  Marchioness  of 
Villemer,  one  of  the  most  delightful  aristocratic  figures  in 
fiction.  She  has  been  described  as  "  a  compHcated  charac- 
ter, marred  by  the  abuse  of  social  relations,  incapable  of 
living  alone,  incapable  even  of  thinking  when  alone,  but 
charmingly  witty  when  brought  into  touch  with  the  wit  of 


George  Sand  233 


others,  whose  sole  joy  in  this  world  is  conversation  which 
does  her  the  service  of  stirring  her  ideas,  of  drawing  her 
from  herself."  Here  as  in  Jean  de  la  Roche  the  real  theme 
is  love  discovering  itself  and  overcoming  some  barrier  not 
lightly  to  be  despised  or  put  aside.  This  is  indeed  the 
nature  of  all  love  stories.  But  in  this  last  and  most  genial 
period  of  George  Sand's  genius  the  note  is  never  forced, 
the  situation  never  reaches  the  tension  of  tragedy.  So 
again  in  Mile,  la  Qiiintinie  (1863)  the  obstacle  is  religious 
difference  in  two  nobly  minded  lovers  where  the  indig- 
nation that  George  Sand  felt  at  Feuillet's  Sibylle  (1862) 
never  alters  the  self-restrained  delicacy  with  which  she 
portrays  the  various  attitudes  of  the  French  mind  toward 
Catholicism.  In  all  these  stories  and  in  the  others  also 
we  feel  that  the  obstacle  that  separates  the  magnanimous 
youth  and  the  tender  maid  is  very  largely  a  figment  of  their 
imagination,  to  be  dispelled  by  some  mutual  confidence 
that  their  love  impels,  or  perhaps  by  some  chance.  The 
psychology  is  shallow  perhaps,  but  it  is  not  false.  You  are 
not  shown  the  abysses  of  the  human  heart,  but  you  are 
pleased  to  watch  the  moonbeams  playing  on  its  rippling 
surface.  George  Sand  seldom  asks  you  to  think.  She  is 
content  to  win  your  sympathetic  interest.  Indeed  it  is 
doubtful  if  she  herself  thought  clearly.  Her  best  characters 
are  those  of  women,  energetic  and  resourceful  and  of 
artistic  temperament,  which  is  only  to  say  that,  here  at  the 
last  as  at  the  first,  she  unconsciously  introduced  herself 
into  the  creatures  of  her  imagination ;  but,  as  her  sympathy 
kept  her  ever  young,  her  young  girls,  so  timidly  romantic, 
so  modestly  coquettish,  were  almost  always  charming. 
These  are  the  special  characteristics  of  the  works  of  her  last 
years,  from  i860  to   her   death,  work  very  uneven,  often 


234      ^  Century  of  French  Fiction 

prolix,  but  on  the  whole  the  most  broadly  human  of  all, 
and  including  those  novels  which  with  T/ie  Devil's  Pool  2xq 
likely  to  have  the  widest  and  most  enduring  popularity. 

George  Sand,  says  Faguet,  was  one  of  the  best  balanced 
organisations  that  ever  lived.  Her  mind  was  clear  but  not 
wide,  admirable  for  superficial  observation  whether  of 
manners  or  of  men,  fond  of  ideas  yet  not  fully  apprehend- 
ing them,  with  the  instincts  of  a  thinker  and  without  his 
power,  much  more  calm  herself  than  the  creations  into 
which  she  poured  what  had  begun  to  ferment  in  her  mind, 
and  so  freed  herself  of  its  possession.  But  if  her  thought  is 
not  deep  it  is  quick,  and  so  is  her  feeling,  which  is  always 
generous,  and  her  imagination,  which  is  always  alert.  There- 
fore she  begins  by  being  romantic,  and  she  remains  more  or 
less  romantic  to  the  close,  though  she  has  described  with 
singular  felicity  in  Mile,  la  Quintinie  and  Mile.  Merquem 
(1868)  the  transition  from  the  romantic  spirit  of  the  reign 
of  Louis  Philippe  to  the  materialistic,  positive  spirit  of  the 
Second  Empire,  a  transition  of  which  it  has  been  said  that 
it  left  fathers  more  youthful  in  feeling  than  their  own  sons. 

To  George  Sand,  whether  as  individual  or  as  novelist,  love 
is  the  mainspring  of  life.  "  Nothing  is  strong  in  me  but 
the  necessity  of  loving,"  she  writes.  It  is  love  alone, 
sexual,  parental,  or  altruistic,  that  gives  meaning  and  value 
to  existence  or  meaning  and  charm  to  nature.  It  is  love 
alone,  and  in  the  greater  part  of  her  novels,  sexual  love, 
that  is  the  motive  of  all  effort,  the  inspiration  of  all  struggle. 
If  one  can  love  without  effort  and  without  struggle,  if  there 
is  no  obstacle,  the  rest  of  paradise  has  begun  on  earth,  there 
is  nothing  more  for  the  lovers  to  do  but  to  exist  and  love. 
Of  course  this  is  most  marked  in  the  novels  of  the  first 
period,  where  it  reaches  at  times  an  exaggeration  that  is 


George  Sand  235 


almost  comic.  The  altruistic  element  is  most  marked  in 
the  second  period,  and  later  we  find  a  fusion  of  both. 
There  is  in  her  attitude  a  touch  of  mysticism.  "  Love," 
she  tells  us,  in  Valentine^  "  is  superior  to  all  other  sentiments 
because  it  has  a  divine  origin." 

In  Jacques  we  are  told  that  Providence  presides  even 
over  inconstancy,  an  idea  developed  with  eloquent  ingenuity 
in  Luci-ezia  Floriani  (1847),  ^^d  even  as  late  as  1857,  in 
Daniella  love  is  presented  as  an  initiation  into  a  fuller 
comprehension  of  Deity.  "  There  is  no  crime  where  there 
is  sincere  love,"  says  Jacques.  Society  is  responsible.  Of 
course  when  George  Sand  writes  thus  she  means  by  love 
what  Goethe  means  by  his  Eternal  Womanly,  "the  holy 
aspiration  of  the  most  ethereal  part  of  our  soul  toward  the 
unknown,"  as  she  makes  L^lia  say.  But  this  mystic  Plato- 
nism  has  never  far  to  seek  for  its  sensuous  symbol,  and  we 
do  not  need  to  go  outside  her  own  novels  to  find  a  mock- 
ing commentary  on  what  Caro  calls  "  the  hallucinations  of 
cynical  chastity." 

Out  of  this  theory  of  her  first  period,  that  love  is  a  divine 
thing  that  brooks  no  contradiction,  springs  naturally  the 
view  of  her  second  period,  that  it  aboHshes  social  distinc- 
tions of  wealth  or  caste.  By  this  she  appealed  to  the  in- 
stinct of  sacrifice  that  characterises  romantic  love,  and  she 
won  the  sympathy  of  many  who,  it  is  to  be  hoped,  did  not 
try  to  practise  her  preaching.  For  love  does  not  level 
ranks,  though  it  is  to  this  thought  that  we  owe  the  generous 
and  gracious  inspiration  that  created  some  of  her  most 
charming  young  women,  the  Marie  of  The  DeviPs  Fool,  the 
Caroline  of  Marquis  de  Villefnery  Genevieve,  Edm^e,  and 
Consuelo. 

But  to  one  who  has  this  conception  of  the  sacred  rights 


236      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

of  passion,  submission  to  the  conventions,  moral  and  social, 
becomes  a  fault,  if  not  an  impossibility.  There  is  in  her 
work  no  Christian  resignation.  The  pride  of  passion  quiv- 
ers through  it  all.  Hence  the  declamatory  element  in  her 
second  period.  Hence,  too,  those  strikes  for  moral  free- 
dom and  appeals  for  social  liberty,  those  prophetic  visions 
of  conjugal  Utopias  in  the  work  of  the  first  period,  though 
she  says  herself,  in  response  to  some  criticisms  of  Nisard, 
that  her  nature  is  that  of  a  poet  rather  than  of  a  legislator, 
and  that  she  may  well  have  said  in  her  haste  "  social  laws  " 
when  she  meant  "  social  prejudices,"  abuses,  or  vices. 

Her  attacks,  first  on  marriage,  and  then  on  social  conven- 
tions generally,  on  what  she  called  "  the  infamous  decrepi- 
tude of  the  world,"  being  based  on  sentiment  and  instinct 
rather  than  on  coherent  reason,  on  the  inspiration  of  ambi- 
ent socialism  rather  than  on  original  thought,  naturally 
yielded  to  the  experience  of  life.  Valvedre  (1861)  contra- 
dicts yiair^z^^^  (1834).  The  most  that  can  be  said  for  the 
socialistic  novels  is  that  they  are  more  readable  than  any  of 
the  works  that  inspired  them,  and  that  they  are  the  aberra- 
tions of  a  good  heart  as  well  as  of  a  great  genius.  But 
what  if  we  bring  this  heart  and  this  genius  back  to  nature  ? 
Let  country  scenes  soothe  the  disappointed  political  re- 
former, and  let  their  mysterious  charm  calm  her  perturbed 
spirit.  For  her  poet  nature  this  will  be  the  most  favourable 
of  all  environments,  not  merely  for  the  development  of  her 
powers  of  artistic  description,  but  for  healthy  ethical 
growth.  No  one  has  watched  nature  with  such  sympathetic 
closeness  as  she  who  says  that  she  has  "always  found  it 
infinitely  more  beautiful  than  she  expected,"  and  never 
gloomy  save  in  the  hours  when  she  saw  it  with  gloomy  eyes. 
So,  to  her,  nature  was  both  a  consolation  and  a  recreation^ 


George  Sand  237 


for  as  she  says  again :  "  The  creations  of  art  speak  to  the 
mind  alone,  but  the  spectacle  of  nature  speaks  to  all 
faculties.  It  penetrates  us  through  all  pores  as  through  all 
ideas.  To  the  purely  intellectual  sentiment  of  admiration 
the  sight  of  the  countryside  adds  a  sensual  pleasure.  The 
freshness  of  the  brooks,  the  perfumes  of  the  plants,  the 
harmonies  of  the  winds  circulate  in  the  blood  and  the 
nerves  at  the  same  time  that  the  splendour  of  their  colours 
and  the  beauty  of  their  forms  insinuate  themselves  into  the 
imagination." 

If  one  sees  nature  with  such  eyes  one  will  not  describe  it 
objectively.  It  will  always  be  a  response  to  human  feeling 
or  a  symbol  of  human  thought.  The  smell  of  sage  clinging 
to  the  hand  from  some  now  distant  mountain  plant  will  sug- 
gest *'  how  precious  a  thing  is  perfume,  which  taking  noth- 
ing from  the  plant  whence  it  emanates  clings  to  the  hand  of 
a  friend  and  follows  him  on  his  journey  to  charm  him,  and 
to  recall  to  him  long  the  beauty  of  the  flower  that  he 
loves.  The  perfume  of  the  soul  is  memory."  Passages 
like  this  are  found  in  her  work  from  the  outset.  Almost 
always  the  psychic  situation  stands  in  relation  to  landscape, 
and  therefore  almost  all  her  stories  are  of  country  life,  of 
men  in  touch  with  nature,  responding  and  corresponding  to 
their  environment,  which  in  its  turn  seems  to  sympathise 
with  them.  It  was  fitting  that  her  last  thought  should  have 
been  of  her  garden,  and  her  last  words,  "  Don't  destroy  the 
green." 

George  Sand  was  of  no  literary  school  and  answered  to 
no  shibboleth.  No  novelist  ever  had  in  greater  measure 
the  story-telling  instinct,  the  perennial  flow  of  imagination. 
No  sooner  had  she  written  the  last  word  of  one  story  than 
she  was  ready  to   begin  another.      She  knew  no  anxious 


238      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

elaboration.  She  never  took,  as  Balzac  tells  us  he  did,  ten 
days  to  think  out  a  story  before  putting  pen  to  paper,  much 
less  the  laborious  years  of  Flaubert's  literary  gestation. 
Her  mind  was  full  of  interesting  situations.  She  selected 
what  struck  her  fancy  and  "  let  her  pen  trot."  When  the 
situation  ceased  to  interest  her  she  drew  her  work  to  a 
close,  preferring  to  give  literary  life  to  another  of  the 
crowding  children  of  her  brain.  Naturally  and  inevitably, 
then,  her  work  lacks  design  and  ordered  composition. 
Quickly  conceived  it  passed  almost  as  quickly  from  her 
mind,  until  presently  she  could  hardly  recall  the  characters 
or  situations  of  former  creations  of  her  fancy.  She  could 
never  have  knit  her  volumes  into  the  unity  of  the  Human 
Coffiedy,  Her  characters  are  not  real  to  her,  as  Balzac's 
were  to  him.  For  while  the  details  of  her  work  are  ob- 
served with  minute  realism  she  is  apt  to  combine  these  into 
*'  superior  beings  "  and  romantic  adventures,  even  when  she 
proposes  to  write  a  book  "wholly  of  analysis  and  medi- 
tation," such  as  the  half- autobiographic  Lucrezia  Floriani 
(1847).  But  even  here  there  is  more  realism  than  we  at 
first  perceive,  for  the  romantic  generation  had  a  mode  of 
expressing  passion  that  was  all  its  own,  and  George  Sand 
did  not  escape  the  spirit  of  her  time  any  more  than  Balzac 
escaped  it. 

As  romanticism  began  to  wane  she  became  conscious  of 
this  tendency  to  exaggeration.  So  in  a  preface  to  Lucrezia 
Floriani  she  tells  us  that  she  "  loves  romantic  events,  the 
unforeseen,  intrigue,  action,"  and  yet  "  does  all  she  can  to 
keep  the  literature  of  her  time  in  a  practicable  path  between 
the  peaceful  lake  and  the  torrent."  Her  instinct  would 
urge  her  to  the  abyss,  but  with  calmer  reason  she  sees  that 
the  torrent  of  imagination  has  pushed  before  it  acts  of  un- 


George  Sand  239 


reason,  or  of  crude  improbability,  and  "a  retrograde  move- 
ment forces  her  back  toward  the  smooth  and  monotonous 
lake  of  analysis,"  and  as  she  does  not  recompose  her  story 
the  reader  has  to  make  all  these  transitions  with  the  author, 
and  the  novel  loses  in  art  what  it  gains  in  freshness  of  con- 
ception. It  is  only  occasionally  that  the  inspiration  re- 
mains with  her  to  the  end,  and  then  the  excellence  that  she 
attains  is  rather  the  gift  of  genius  than  the  conquest  of  tal- 
ent and  will.  In  this  she  forms  the  most  striking  contrast 
possible  to  the  novelists  of  the  scientific  generation  who  fol- 
lowed, or  even  to  her  early  contemporary  Balzac.  From  the 
point  of  view  of  the  originators  of  fiction,  no  book  would 
be  a  good  novel  that  was  not  a  good  story.  Many  of  our 
modern  novelists  might  well  shrink  from  the  application  of 
this  canon.  None  could  bear  it  with  more  equanimity  than 
George  Sand,  in  spite  of  her  lack  of  delicate  reserve  and 
concise  sobriety. 

If  now  from  her  general  conception  of  the  novelist's  art 
we  pass  to  her  style  in  the  narrower  sense  of  diction,  it 
would  seem  that  she  had  almost  from  the  very  first  the 
qualities  that  distinguished  her  to  the  last.  Her  style  was 
like  herself,  full,  rounded,  supple,  mobile,  almost  always 
easy,  often  fiery,  sometimes  too  high-pitched  and  over-em- 
phatic, and  sometimes  passionately  eloquent.  She  seemed 
to  possess,  instinctively,  all  the  resources  of  the  language, 
writing  well  as  naturally  as  most  write  ill,  and  so  falling 
sometimes  into  the  fault  of  her  talent,  into  that  facile  pro- 
lixity that  leaves  no  scope  for  revery,  and  mars  at  times  the 
work  of  all  natural  stylists,  such  as  Hugo,  and  rarely  that  of 
the  conscious  artists,  such  as  Flaubert.  A  worse  fault  than 
prolixity  is  the  occasional  false  emphasis,  the  author  being 


240      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

carried  by  a  stream  of  words  beyond  the  depth  of  her  ideas. 
And  then,  sometimes,  she  plays  with  her  talent,  giving  free 
bridle  to  fancy  in  long  conversations  that  doubtless  amused 
her,  and  may  amuse  us,  but  do  not  advance  the  story.  And 
finally  the  books  date  themselves  as  of  the  romantic  school 
by  an  excess  of  sentiment  and  of  false  notes  in  its  expres- 
sion. But  all  this  need  not,  and  should  not,  blind  us  to  a 
merit  and  charm  that  no  change  in  popular  taste  can  take 
away,  though  George  Sand's  fame  will,  no  doubt,  seem  to 
rise  and  fall  as  the  literary  pendulum  sways  between  realism 
and  idealism.  It  surely  reached  its  lowest  point  in  'the 
decade  that  followed  her  death  (1876),  and  now  tends  to 
wax  with  the  waning  of  pseudo-scientific  fiction.  But 
whether  she  be  widely  read  or  generally  forgotten,  it  is  but 
justice  to  say,  as  has  been  said,  that  there  is  hardly  a 
woman  anywhere  to-day  whose  life  she  has  not  affected,  for 
her  influence  has  been  felt  in  every  changed  idea  in  the  re- 
lation of  the  sexes  in  our  generation.  And  more,  in  French 
literature  her  influence  has  been  steadily  tonic.  For  there 
pulsed  through  her  a  splendid  confidence  in  the  power 
of  the  human  will ;  she  was  as  fundamentally  and  naturally 
optimistic  as  Madame  de  Stael.  If  she  protested  against 
marriage  it  was  only  in  the  name  of  purity.  All  her  ex- 
cesses grew  from  her  greatness  of  soul.  As  Matthew 
Arnold  has  well  said,  "  though  others  in  the  literature  of  our 
century  may  have  been  greater,  wiser,  purer,  more  poetic, 
the  most  varied  and  attractive  influence  is  hers."  Her 
passions  and  errors  will  be  forgotten,  while  "the  immense 
vibration  of  her  voice  will  not  soon  pass  away.  There  will 
remain  of  her  the  sense  of  benefit  and  of  stimulus  from  the 
passage  upon  earth  of  that  large  and  frank  nature,  that 


George  Sand  241 


large  and  pure  utterance  —  the  utterance  of  the  early  gods. 
There  will  remain  an  admiring  and  ever  widening  report  of 
that  great  soul,  simple,  affectionate,  without  vanity,  without 
pedantry,  human,  equitable,  patient,  kind.  ...  In  her  case 
we  shall  not  err  if  we  adopt  the  poet's  faith,  — 

*  And  feel  that  she  is  greater  than  we  k'Sow.'  " 


x6 


CHAPTER  XI 

GUSTAVE    FLAUBERT 

DURING  the  first  half  of  the  nineteenth  century  the  two 
French  writers  of  most  commanding  genius  are  surely 
Hugo  and  Balzac,  Hugo  for  imagination  and  form,  for  lan- 
guage and  style,  Balzac  for  the  breadth  of  his  conceptions, 
for  his  scientific  spirit  and  psychologic  insight.  And  now 
at  the  opening  of  the  second  half- century  comes  one  who 
seeks  to  unite  the  minute  realistic  vision  of  Balzac  with  the 
highest  rhetorical  skill,  and  we  have  the  few  precious  mas- 
terpieces of  Gustave  Flaubert ;  only  five  volumes  as  against 
Balzac's  fifty,  but  five  volumes  that  can  perish  only  with  the 
extinction  of  literary  art.  For  his  labour  was  as  intense,  as 
indefatigable,  as  that  which  piled  up  the  half-hundred  vol- 
umes of  the  Human  Comedy,  and  it  was  more  prolonged. 
There  are  few,  if  any,  men  of  letters  whose  life  has  been  a 
more  enduring  martyrdom  to  an  endeavour  to  realise  what 
was  perhaps  an  unattainable  ideal.  If  it  be  true  to  say,  with 
Bourget,  that  French  prose  is  unique  among  all  languages 
of  the  world  for  its  capabilities  of  polished  precision,  if 
France  possesses  the  kingdom  of  the  Written  Phrase,  surely 
Gustave  Flaubert  is  a  king  in  this  realm,  who,  though  dead, 
has  as  yet  no  successor. 

But  the  importance  of  these  five  volumes  is  not  only  in 
their  faultless  style,  but  also  in  the  precision  with  which 
they  enunciate  a  view  of  the  art  of  fiction  that  was  to  exer- 
cise a  dominating  influence  on  the  succeeding  generation. 


Gustave  Flaubert  243 

It  seemed,  says  Zola,  as  though  with  the  appearance  of 
Madame  Bovary^  m  1857,  the  code  of  the  new  art,  "  the 
formula  of  the  modern  novel,  scattered  through  the  colossal 
work  of  Balzac  had  been  deduced  and  clearly  enunciated  in 
these  four  hundred  pages."  It  became  a  type,  a  definite 
model.  "  Not  one  of  the  beginners  of  that  day  who  has 
come  to  anything  that  will  not  recognise  at  the  least  an 
initiator  in  Gustave   Flaubert." 

He  was  born  in  182 1.  His  father.  Dr.  Achille  Flaubert, 
was  chief  surgeon  at  the  hospital  at  Rouen,  where  his  virtues 
have  remained  legendary,  and  he  bequeathed  many  of  them 
to  his  son,  in  whom  he  would  have  desired  to  see  his  suc- 
cessor. Gustave  Flaubert  had  always  a  certain  unerring 
power  of  psychic  dissection.  His  interest  in  truth  con- 
quered, or  at  least  he  strove  to  make  it  conquer,  any  mani- 
festations of  personal  sympathy,  and  this  gave  to  his  writing 
the  appearance  of  hardness.  But  for  medicine  he  had  no 
aptitude.  Indeed,  it  is  rare  that  any  vocation  is  more 
strongly  or  earlier  marked  than  his  for  literature.  The  first 
letter  of  his  correspondence,  written  at  the  age  of  nine  to  a 
schoolfellow,  proposes  a  literary  partnership  in  which  he 
should  write  the  comedies,  and  to  the  end  he  welcomed  no 
diversion  from  his  art.  In  this  aspiration  he  found,  how- 
ever, no  sympathy  at  home.  But  the  family  were  wealthy, 
he  was  able  to  travel  on  leaving  school,  and  since  he 
showed  no  aptitude  for  medicine  he  began  in  1 840  to  study 
law  and  literature  in  Paris,  returning,  however,  for  consider- 
able periods  to  Rouen,  and  already  blighted  with  the  knowl- 
edge that  he  was  an  epileptic.  The  influences,  both  at 
Paris,  and  previously  at  school,  were  strongly  romantic. 
At  fourteen  he  had  conceived  a  violent  love  for  a  lady  whom 
he  has  pictured  as  Madame  Arneux  in  Sentimental  Educa- 


/ 


244      ^  Century  of  French  Fiction 

fion,  and  from  1846  to  1854  he  carried  on  a  tender  corre- 
spondence with  Madame  Colet,  a  Hterary  lady  of  some  dis- 
tinction in  Paris,  His  first  sympathies  were  wholly  with  the 
men  of  the  thirties.  "  I  do  not  know,"  he  writes,  in  a  no- 
tice prefixed  to  the  poems  of  a  schoolmate,  Louis  Bouilhet, 
"what  may  be  the  dreams  of  schoolboys  now-a-days,  but 
ours  were  superbly  extravagant.  Inspired  by  the  remote 
echoes  of  romanticism  .  .  .  those  gifted  with  enthusiastic 
hearts  sighed  for  dramatic  scenes  of  love  with  the  obligatory 
gondolas,  masks,  and  ladies  swooning  in  post-chaises  on 
Calabrian  hills ;  sterner  minds  aspired  to  the  conspirator's 
sword.  .  .  .  And  we  were  not  only  troubadours,  revolution- 
ists, and  orientalists ;  above  all  we  were  artists.  We  ruined 
our  eyes  reading  novels  in  the  dormitory,  we  carried  dag- 
gers in  our  pockets  like  Antony.  .  .  .  We  merited  little 
praise,  but  then  how  we  hated  everything  mean,  how  pas- 
sionate was  our  craving  for  greatness,  .  .  .  how  we  wor- 
shipped Victor  Hugo." 

Meantime  the  young  enthusiast  of  beauty  was  growing  up 
in  the  most  prosaic  of  all  recent  French  regimes.  He 
found  himself  therefore  with  a  nature  and  an  education  out 
of  touch  with  his  surroundings,  and  it  is  such  natures  as 
that,  in  various  environments,  that  he  has  chosen  for  the 
special  object  of  his  study.  Having  no  sympathy  with  the 
materialistic  trend  of  a  democratic  society,  and  wishing  also 
to  hide  an  infirmity  of  which  the  dread  was  never  absent 
from  his  mind,  he  became  more  and  more  a  recluse.  With 
the  exception  of  two  journeys  to  the  East  and  to  Carthage, 
both  undertaken  for  literary  ends,  he  spent  his  life  between 
his  suburban  house  at  Rouen  and  occasional  visits  to  Paris. 
At  times  he  would  remain  cloistered  for  months  together, 
and  after  his  mother's  death  there  was  little  of  luxury  or 


Gustave  Flaubert  245 

even  of  comfort  in  surroundings  where  everything  spoke  of 
the  unremitting  study  in  which  he  sought  consolation  for 
the  domestic  Ufe  that  his  disease  forced  him  to  forego. 
This  had  a  controlling  influence  on  his  artistic  point  of 
view.  "All  the  occurrences  of  life  appeared  to  me,"  he 
says,  "as  material  for  description.  Nothing,  even  my  own 
existence,  has  to  me  any  other  significance."  That  is  to 
say,  literature  was  to  him  an  end  in  itself.  He  was  the 
type  of  the  artist  for  art's  sake,  and  naturally  so,  because  it 
was  in  art  that  he  sought  diversion  from  the  pain  of  self- 
contemplation,  from  his  epileptic's  fear  of  life.  If  litera- 
ture was  to  be  his  consolation  it  could  be  so  only  by  being 
rigidly,  uncompromisingly  objective.  He  defends  this 
view  of  the  novelist's  art  with  passionate  iteration  in  the 
whole  series  of  his  ten  years'  correspondence  with  George 
Sand. 

It  was  under  these  circumstances  and  with  these  aims, 
personal  and  literary,  that  he  wrote  Madame  Bovary, 
which  was  first  published  in  the  Revue  de  Farts,  during 
the  last  quarter  of  1856.  Precisely  how  long  he  had  had 
it  in  hand  is  not  clear,  possibly  since  1852,  for  though  he 
worked  intently  and  incessantly,  "  eighteen  hours  out  of  the 
twenty-four,"  it  is  said,  his  interest  was  in  the  labour,  not  in 
its  completion.  "  I  have  in  my  mind,"  he  writes,  "  a  cer- 
tain method  of  writing,  a  certain  fitness  of  style  that  I  seek 
to  attain.  .  .  .  When  the  time  comes  and  I  think  I  have 
plucked  the  apricot  I  may  be  willing  to  sell  it  and  let 
people  applaud  if  they  find  it  good.  But  if  by  that  time  it 
is  too  late,  if  nobody  cares  for  it  any  more,  never  mind." 
"  I  seek  something  better  than  success,  I  seek  to  please 
myself."\ 

Once    before    the    public    Madame    Bovary   attracted 


246      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

immediate  and  wide  attention,  stimulated  at  first  no  doubt 
by  the  astounding  fatuity  of  the  government,  who  saw  fit  to 
prosecute  its  author  and  pubHsher  for  immorality,  and  that 
in  the  heyday  of  the  Second  Empire.  The  prosecuting 
attorney's  speech  is  such  a  monument  to  human  imbecility 
as  almost  to  make  Flaubert's  Bouvard  and  Pecuchet  super- 
fluous, and  the  acquittal  was  accompanied  with  "  considera- 
tions "  that  one  would  have  expected  rather  under  the 
Long  Parliament  in  England  than  in  the  France  of  Louis 
Napoleon.  The  ultimate  result  was  to  make  the  author 
famous  in  spite  of  himself,  and  to  make  of  his  first  novel  a 
starting-point  of  a  new  school  in  fiction,  as  The  Lady  with'- 
the  Camellias  four  years  before  had  been  in  the  drama. 

Madame  Bovary  is  not  only  not  romantic,  it  is  the  bit- 
terest satire  on  romanticism.  Its  scene  is  the  world  of 
commonplace  and  the  lesson  of  it  is  that  in  that  world 
sentiment  leads  to  shipwreck,  and  self-sufficient  mediocrity 
to  success.  And  in  this,  as  Sainte-Beuve  observed  at  the 
time,  it  marks  the  new  epoch,  the  epoch  of  science,  minute 
observation,  maturity,  and  contempt  or  dread  of  sentimental 
sympathy.  Holding  his  pen  in  the  same  spirit  that  his 
father  had  held  the  dissecting  knife,  he  lays  bare  for  us  here 
first  the  weary  banality  of  provincial  life,  and  then  the  hope- 
lessness of  the  romantic  revolt  against  banality.  There  is 
of  course  another  solution  of  the  difficulty  and  a  brighter 
side  to  the  picture,  but  that  it  is  not  his  present  purpose  to 
see.  Throughout  the  book  we  shall  not  find  a  person  to 
imitate  or  an  act  to  admire. 

The  first  of  the  personages  to  be  introduced  to  us  and 
one  of  the  most  interesting  characters  of  the  book  is  Charles 
Bovary,  a  doctor  mediocre  and  almost  contemptible  even 
in  his  goodness,  as  true  to  nature  and  as  common  in  real 


Gustave  Flaubert  247 

life  as  he  is  fatuous  and  banal.  We  see  him  first  at  school, 
the  typical  dull  pupil,  then  struggling  through  his  medical 
examinations  and  bundled  by  his  parents  into  a  marriage 
that  was  not  expected  to  bring  him  sympathy,  and  did  not 
actually  bring  him  money.  Then  he  is  attracted  to  the 
daughter  of  a  well-to-do  farmer,  Emma,  the  chief  figure 
of  the  novel,  whom  after  his  first  wife's  death  he  awkwardly 
courts  and  presently  marries,  himself  apparently  the  more 
innocent  of  the  two ;  for  Emma's  education  had  been  that 
of  religious  sentiment  spiced  by  Lamartine's  poetry,  English 
Keepsakes  and  romantic  novels,  a  deliberate  perversion  of 
soul,  the  results  of  which  it  is  the  purpose  of  this  novel  to 
show. 

Charles  was  happy  in  his  marriage.  "  He  went  about 
ruminating  his  bliss  like  those  who  savour  still  after  dinner 
the  taste  of  the  truffles  they  are  digesting."  Emma  mean- 
time was  still  "  seeking  to  discover  just  what  in  life  people 
meant  by  the  words  'felicity,'  'passion,'  '  intoxication,'  that 
had  seemed  to  her  so  beautiful  in  books."  Clearly  her  hus- 
band was  not  one  of  those  gentlemen  "  brave  as  lions,  gentle 
as  lambs,  virtuous  as  men  never  are,  always  well  dressed,  and 
who  wept  like  water  jars,"  of  whom  she  had  read  at  fifteen 
in  novels  from  the  circulating  library.  His  conversation 
was  "  flat  as  a  street  sidewalk."  She  grew  weary  of  his 
monotonous  caresses,  and  presently  an  event  came  into  her 
life  that  acted  as  a  transforming  yeast  in  her  moral  nature. 
She  was  invited  to  an  aristocratic  ball. 

From  the  moment  that  she  had  come  in  contact  with 
this  new  social  sphere  there  began  to  grow  in  her  a  ferment 
that  did  not  cease  till  it  had  destroyed  her,  body  and  soul. 
In  her  desire  she  confounded  the  sensualities  of  luxury  with 
the  joys  of  the  heart,  elegance  of  manners  with  delicacy  of 


248      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

sentiment.  "  She  desired  at  the  same  instant  to  die,  and 
to  live  in  Paris."  Her  husband,  watching  her  lassitude 
with  stupid  affection,  thought  a  change  of  environment 
would  help  her,  sacrificed  his  growing  practice  to  her  incip- 
ient infidelity,  and  was  doubtless  despised  the  more  for  his 
affection. 

Their  new  home  was  still  in  Normandy,  at  Yonville  near 
Rouen.  Here  the  passive  incubation  of  Emma's  moral 
disease  reaches  a  critical  stage.  She  meets  L^on,  a  law 
student  who  shares  her  romantic  sympathies,  but  he  is  too 
timid  and  she  not  yet  sufficiently  corrupt  that  their  relations 
should  pass  beyond  the  platonic,  and  he  leaves  Yonville  to 
pursue  legal  studies  and  lose  somewhat  of  his  naivetd  in 
Paris. 

At  this  point  we  are  introduced  to  M.  Homais,  a  charac- 
ter as  typical  as  any  in  the  novel,  and  so  finely  drawn  as 
to  have  become  almost  from  the  first  a  byword.  He  is 
the  incarnation  of  commonplace,  "  one  of  our  first  citizens, 
pompous,  a  self-made  man,  and  believing  in  his  maker," 
but  a  shrewd  intriguer,  knowing  how  to  use  the  press  and 
to  manufacture  and  guide  public  opinion,  with  his  mouth 
always  full  of  half-masticated  science,  the  bright  peony- 
flower  of  mediocracy,  just  the  man  to  impose  himself  on 
the  masses,  and  on  those  whom  they  naturally  choose  to 
govern  them,  and  to  be  crowned  with  honour  and  deco- 
rated with  the  Cross  at  the  story's  close,  —  the  true  type  of 
"triumphant  democracy."  Set  off  against  Homais  is  the 
curate  Bournisien,  he  too  hopelessly  commonplace  and 
unable  to  comprehend,  much  less  to  guide,  poor  Emma's 
aspirations  toward  a  higher  social  life,  and  to  teach  her  to 
bear  ennui,  to  create  for  herself  worthy  aims,  or  at  least 
innocent  distractions.    .A  number  of  minor  characters  also 


Gustave  Flaubert  249 

make  their  appearance,  —  the  sacristan  Lestiboudois,  the 
notary  Guillaumin,  the  money-lending  merchant  Lheureux, 
—  all  admirably  individualised,  but  none  of  them  essential 
to  our  present  purpose  save  only  the  burly  country  gentle- 
man Rodolphe,  to  whose  vulgarity,  masked  under  a  veneer 
of  sentiment  that  is  the  ironical  echo  of  her  own,  Emma 
falls  victim  after  having  tried  to  get  sentimental  consola- 
tion in  religion,  and  finding  it,  when  so  approached,  as 
stale  and  as  commonplace  as  her  domestic  relations. 

The  courtship  of  Rodolphe  is  a  scene  of  admirable  irony. 
The  mocking  parody  of  romantic  sentiment  is  relentlessly 
bitter  as  he  whispers  his  temptation  to  her  at  a  country 
fair,  between  the  pauses  of  a  politician's  speech  in  which 
fatuous  demagogy  reaches  its  artistic  climax  and  ultimate 
expression.  The  fatal  step  once  taken,  "the  summits  of 
sentiment  seemed  to  be  sparkling  beneath  her,  thought  and 
ordinary  existence  appeared  only  far  away,  below,  in 
shadow  between  the  intervals  of  these  heights."  But  from 
this  pinnacle  she  is  drawn  irresistibly  down  to  the  common- 
place, and  below  it  to  the  base,  the  sensuous,  —  yes,  there 
are  moments  when  we  see,  as  by  a  flash,  that  she  would 
not  shrink  from  the  criminal,  from  murder  itself.  In  vain 
she  beats  her  poor  wings  to  rise  to  the  heights  of  senti- 
ment, and  strains  language  to  make  it  say  what  she  can 
no  longer  feel.  "  Their  great  love  seemed  to  diminish  be- 
neath her  like  the  water  of  a  river  that  had  been  absorbed 
into  its  bed,  of  which  she  saw  now  the  muddy  bottom.'* 
The  eternal  monotony  of  passion  wearied  her  lover  also, 
and  when  in  utter  desperation  of  thwarted  romanticism  she 
suggests  flight  together,  he  writes  her  a  letter,  over  which 
he  sprinkles  water  with  his  fingers  to  simulate  tears,  and 
elects  to  travel  alone. 


250      A   Century  of  French  Fiction 

The  shock  was  terrible.  Again  she  sought  refuge  in  the 
religious  sentiment,  "addressing  to  the  Lord  the  same 
tender  words  that  once  she  had  murmured  to  her  lover," 
and  comparing  herself,  in  the  pride  of  her  devotion,  to 
La  Valli^re.  To  distract  her,  Charles  takes  her  to  the 
opera  at  Rouen,  and  we  have  a  good  pendant  scene  to 
Fielding's  Partridge  at  the  theatre.  The  sentiment  of 
Italian  opera  is  poison  to  her,  and  when  now  she  meets 
L6on  once  more  she  is  so  charmed  with  the  situation,  and 
with  the  necessity  of  defending  herself,  that  she  neglects 
the  defence.  Admirable  is  the  account  of  the  mental  and 
moral  disintegration  of  Emma  under  this  new  relation. 
She  comes  to  feel  a  cowardly  docility  toward  her  husband, 
and  at  the  same  time  plunges  into  debt  and  reckless  false- 
hood ;  but,  since  "  she  was  more  charming  for  her  husband 
than  ever,  made  him  pistache-cream-cakes,  and  played 
waltzes  after  dinner,"  he  thought  himself  the  happiest  of 
mortals. 

We  need  not  follow  her  in  the  last  steps  of  this  corruption, 
"  almost  immaterial,  it  was  so  deep  and  so  dissimulated." 
Here  as  before  it  is  a  desperate  and  a  vain  struggle  to  sat- 
isfy false  sentiment,  culminating  in  the  revelation  that  the 
second  idol  of  her  romantic  fancy  was  a  sensual  coward  as 
the  first  had  been  a  sensual  Don  Juan.  Here,  then,  is  her 
final  shipwreck.  Abandoned  with  a  base  subterfuge  by 
L^on,  once  more  rejected  "  with  that  natural  pusillanimity 
that  characterises  the  strong  sex"  by  Rodolphe,  without 
once  suspecting,  so  distorted  had  her  moral  sense  become, 
the  depth  of  such  abasement,  the  only  refuge  that  remained 
to  her  from  the  bitter  dregs  of  sentiment  deceived  and 
mocked  was  poison.  Her  education  had  made  it  impossi- 
ble for  her  to  adapt  herself  to  the  actual  world.     Her  ideals 


Gustave  Flaubert  251 

of  religion  were  as  unreal  to  her  as  her  ideals  of  domestic  or 
of  social  life.  Flaubert  would  have  us  regard  her  as  a 
typical  victim  of  romanticism,  somewhat  overcharged,  as  all 
types  are  apt  to  be,  and  yet  essentially  true.  She  is  the 
tragic  reduction  to  the  absurd  of  romantic  love,  and  with 
all  her  faults  more  sinned  against  than  sinning. 

Admirable  in  its  unflinching  realism  is  the  description  of 
her  last  hours,  to  which  the  mortal  banality  of  the  funeral  is 
a  most  artistic  foil.  To  the  last  and  even  beyond  the  grave 
she  held  the  love  of  the  poor  simple  Charles,  whose  vulgar 
head,  as  Sainte-Beuve  says,  needs  but  a  single  touch  of  the 
sculptor's  thumb  to  become  nobly  pathetic.  Even  when 
he  discovers  her  faults  he  blames  himself  rather  than  her  or 
her  lovers,  feeling  perhaps,  in  his  dim  way,  that  she  too  was 
of  those  who  love  not  wisely  but  too  well,  a  victim  of  her 
environment. 

Such  is  the  story  and  such  the  social  and  ethical  bearing 
of  Madame  B ovary ^  but  no  summary  can  do  justice  to  the 
many  passages  of  vivid  narration  or  of  exquisite  descrip- 
tion, whose  studied  euphony  appears  first  when  they  are 
read  aloud,  as  Flaubert  himself  was  wont  to  read  repeatedly 
every  paragraph  that  he  wrote.  Only  when  we  subject  them 
to  such  tests  do  we  realise  how  some  of  his  pages  stand, 
as  he  himself  said,  "  by  the  sheer  power  of  their  style, 
balanced  like  the  earth  without  support  in  the  heavens," 
now  with  the  serenity  of  a  Grecian  marble,  now  with  the 
finished  detail  of  a  Dutch  master,  now  with  the  subtle 
harmony  of  Lydian  airs  or  with  the  sinuous  grace  of  a 
Tennysonian  song  ;  quite  lost  on  the  majority  of  readers,  but 
an  enduring  delight  to  the  few,  as  surely  they  were  to  their 
author.  And  then  there  are  scattered  up  and  down  through 
the  book  a  multitude  of  happily  turned  phrases,  usually 


252      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

uf  irony,  where  we  seem  to  see  the  author  poising  on  his 
needle-point  the  acid  drop  and  placing  it  with  slow,  delicate 
precision  upon  the  quivering  nerve. 

The  danger  of  romantic  imagination  —  such  had  been  the 
subject  of  Madame  Bovary^  and  such  continued  to  be  the 
subject  of  Salainmbd  seven  years  later,  but  with  a  radical 
difference  ;  for  while  in  Madame  B ovary ^  he  had  used  the 
realistic  method  on  his  own  Normandy,  he  undertook  here 
to  apply  it  to  an  age  and  land  of  which  his  ideas  were  in- 
evitably the  products  of  trained  imagination,  the  Carthage 
of  240  to  237  B.  c,  during  the  revolt  of  the  mercenaries 
that  followed  the  first  Punic  War.  He  called  this  "epic 
realism."  The  result  is  an  interesting  literary  feat,  more 
interesting,  perhaps,  than  Chateaubriand's  Martyrs^  with 
which  it  is  natural  to  compare  it,  but  the  book  is  not  so 
popular,  and  surely  it  is  not  so  significant  as  Madame 
Bovary.  It  does  not  live  as  a  whole.  Its  characters  may 
be  true  or  not  for  their  country  and  time,  but  they  are  not 
true  for  us.  We  do  not  sympathise  with  them,  because  we 
do  not  understand  them,  and  therefore  their  fate  rouses  a 
languid  interest  beside  Emma's  shipwreck  and  Homais* 
success.  There  seems  to  be,  as  an  acute  critic  has  said,  a 
disproportion  between  the  subject  and  the  means  used  in 
treating  it.  To  recount  the  story  is  quite  unnecessary  to 
our  purpose,  but  it  contains  passages,  and  they  are  not 
a  few,  which  in  picturesque  brilliancy  surpass  anything 
attempted  in  the  former  novel. 

One  of  these  is  at  the  very  opening,  an  orgiac  feast 
granted  by  the  timorous  Carthaginians  to  their  mercenaries 
returned  from  the  long  war  with  Rome.  The  confusion  of 
peoples,  customs,  and  languages,  the  varied  profusion  of 
meats  and  drinks,  the  gradations  of  drunken  recklessness, 


Gustave  Flaubert  253 

the  apparition  of  Salammbo  in  mystic  splendour  chanting 
her  rhythmic  liturgies,  —  all  this  is  done  with  great  skill ;  and 
an  African  sunrise  in  this  chapter  is  perhaps  the  finest  half- 
page  that  Flaubert  ever  penned.  But  the  story  is  ill-artic- 
ulated. Its  construction  is  defective  not  merely  artistically, 
but  logically.  The  style  may  be  always  restrained,  but  the 
subjects,  crucified  lions,  immolations  to  Moloch,  and  the  like, 
are  intentionally  bizarre.  Flaubert  may  tell  us  nothing  that 
is  not  suggested  by  his  scanty  authorities,  but  he  does  not 
treat  them  in  a  critical  spirit.  All  that  could  be  observed 
by  the  attentive  traveller  is  handled  as  well,  possibly  better 
here  than  in  Madame  Bovary^  but  what  could  not  be 
observed,  the  psychology,  is  at  least  fanciful  and  illusory. 
It  attains  the  exotic  only  by  ceasing  to  be  broadly  human. 
Salammbo,  as  the  author  shows  her  here  and  as  she  appears 
throughout,  is  too  "  different,"  in  Stendhal's  sense,  from  any 
type  of  mind  that  we  know,  to  be  interesting  or  even 
intelligible  to  us.  Though  passing  her  life  in  virgin 
adoration  of  the  feminine  principle  of  fecundity,  Tanit,  to 
which  Moloch  is  the  corresponding  male  principle,  it  is  as 
a  Venus  Urania  that  she  worships  her,  and  her  days  are 
passed  in  an  unaroused  innocence  of  mystic  revery.  She 
is,  in  fact,  as  Sainte-Beuve  says,  a  sort  of  sentimental  Elvire, 
as  unreal  as  that  figment  of  Lamartine's  romantic  dreams, 
and  suggesting  also  the  Vell^da  of  Chateaubriand's  MartyrSy 
as  romantic,  though  of  course  from  her  environment  more 
artificial  than  she.  It  may  be  that  the  modes  of  thought 
and  feeling  in  ancient  Carthage  were  radically  different  from 
ours.  If  they  were,  then  that  time  and  country  are  not  good 
subjects  for  historical  fiction,  for  you  can  restore  antiquity, 
but  you  cannot  resuscitate  it. 

Taken  as  a  whole,  then,  Salammbo  must  be  regarded  as  a 


254     ^  Century  of  French  Fiction 

failure,  but  it  was  a  failure  such  as  only  a  great,  inde- 
fatigable, and  high-souled  artist  could  have  made.  Here 
more  than  in  any  other  of  his  novels  we  feel  the  struggle 
between  the  old  romanticism  and  the  new  scientific  spirit. 
The  book  arouses  wonder  rather  than  sympathy.  It  will  be 
admired,  it  will  not  be  enjoyed.  In  a  natural  reaction 
against  the  milk-and-water  antiquity  of  F^nelon  and  the 
Young  Anairharsis  it  describes  cruelly  a  cruel  civilisation, 
but  we  feel,  rather  than  know,  —  for  who  knows  ?  —  that  the 
impression  is  at  least  incomplete.  Then,  after  this  supping 
full  of  the  horrors  of  Moloch,  the  author  invites  us  to  break- 
fast with  the  jackals  and  "the  eaters  of  unclean  things." 
There  is  a  too  constant  evocation  of  the  ghastly  and  weird, 
and  the  superb  descriptions,  magnified  and  irradiated  by 
the  sun  of  Africa,  do  not  suffice  to  relieve  the  monotony. 
Seven  years  after  the  world  had  been  perplexed  by 
Salanunbd  it  was  perplexed  once  more  by  Seniijnental 
Education  (PEducation  sentimentale,  1869),  which  fell 
on  evil  days  for  literature,  for  it  appeared  just  as  all  France 
was  intent  on  the  life  and  death  struggle  of  the  Second 
Empire.  Thus  it  failed  to  attract  the  critical  attention  that 
might  otherwise  have  fallen  to  it,  and  since  the  novel  needed 
criticism  to  be  understood,  it  quite  failed  to  be  enjoyed. 
Indeed  even  to-day  fewer  critics  discuss  the  question  whether 
it  is  good  than  why  it  is  bad.  As  the  title  may  suggest,  the 
novel  is  a  pendant  to  Madame  Bovary.  That  was  to  show 
the  effect  of  sentimental  education  on  a  provincial  woman ; 
this  should  show  it  in  a  Parisian,  Fr^d^ric  Moreau,  with  the 
revolution  of  1848  and  its  preludes  for  a  background.  The 
story  is  of  the  slightest,  slighter  even  than  that  of  Salammbd, 
The  book  is  the  picture  of  a  generation  and  of  its  political 
and  moral  bankruptcy  culminating  in  the  Second  Empire. 


Gustave  Flaubert  255 

If  it  be  urged  that  the  novel  lacks  unity,  Flaubert  would 
reply  that  life  lacks  it,  and  that  this  is  an  advance  in  realis- 
tic art ;  and  as  such  the  school  of  the  Goncourts  regarded 
it,  with  considerable  temporary  effect  on  the  development 
of  fiction.  Thus  to  Zola  it  seems  "  the  only  truly  historical 
novel  that  I  know,  the  sole  true,  exact,  complete  one,  in 
which  the  resurrection  of  dead  hours  is  absolute,  with  no 
trace  of  the  novelist's  trade." 

Such  an  attempt  may  show  praiseworthy  daring,  and  to 
it  Flaubert  gave  the  most  minute  and  intense  study,  but  it 
was  inevitable  that  the  result  of  this  painful  gestation  should 
lack  interest,  because  it  lacked  unity.  We  do  not  seek  in 
a  novel  the  reproduction  of  life,  but  the  impression  of  life. 
And  then  the  tendency  that  we  noted  in  Madame  Bovary 
to  present  only  characters  of  a  contemptible  mediocrity, 
whether  of  vice  or  virtue,  is  pushed  here  beyond  reasonable 
limits.  It  might  be  as  true  as  the  multiplication  table,  but 
it  would  not  be  interesting.  But  is  it  true  ?  Is  not  Flau- 
bert the  dupe  of  his  own  limitations?  He  liked  to  boast 
that  he  was  implacable  to  humanity,  but  he  forgot  that  he 
had  himself  said  that  disillusion  is  of  the  nature  of  weak 
minds.  "  Distrust  the  disgusted.  They  are  almost  always 
the  impotent."  One  cannot  but  feel  that  Sentimental 
Education  marks  a  growing  sterility  in  Flaubert's  genius. 
"  Withered  Fruits "  was  the  book's  original  title,  and  the 
novel  itself  may  seem  to  be  one  of  them,  though  the  book 
is  one  of  considerable  interest  and  power,  and  contains 
some  very  brilliant  episodes. 

Flaubert  is  not  merely  "  implacable  "  to  humanity,  he  is 
unjust.  In  Madame  Bovary  there  was  a  corner  left  for  true 
sentiment  and  honest  pathos.  Here  there  is  nothing  of 
this.     Nobody  is  magnanimous,  frank,  or  noble  \  all  is  petty. 


256      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

vulgar,  contemptible.  Flaubert's  irony  itself  has  no  gene- 
rous fire,  and  the  strongest  sentiment  that  we  feel  in  finish- 
ing the  novel  is  pity  for  the  man  who  has  such  an  outlook 
on  the  world.  We  may  call  it  "  a  magnificent  marble 
temple  erected  to  impotence,"  and  speak  of  "  epic  plati- 
tude," but,  as  Brunetifere  finely  asks  in  connection  with  this 
novel,  "  Of  what  use  is  it  to  love  art  if  one  does  not  love 
mankind?" 

Throughout  this  long  panorama  of  social  disillusion  and 
political  incompetence  the  style  is  curbed,  held  rigidly 
down  to  the  mediocrity  of  the  subject.  One  cannot  help 
feeling  that  it  must  have  cost  almost  as  much  effort  to  the 
author  as  it  does  to  the  reader,  though  there  are  occasional 
flashes  of  irony  that  reveal  the  depths  of  human  nature. 
Nor  should  the  episodic  scenes  in  the  novel  be  forgotten, 
the  boat  trip  on  the  Seine  at  the  opening,  the  ball  in  the 
demi-monde  contrasted  with  the  cold  banality  of  the 
banker's  reception,  and  a  death-bed  ghastly  in  its  egoism. 
Still  better  is  the  charming  idyl  of  love  at  Fontainebleau, 
with  the  sad  tale  of  the  youth  of  Rosanette,  who  had  found 
it  a  misfortune  to  have  a  mother.  Excellent,  too,  are  the 
historical  scenes,  the  joyous  sacking  of  the  Tuileries  and 
the  brutal  desperation  of  the  mobs  of  June,  with  their  yet 
more  brutal  suppression.  While,  then,  no  one  would  claim 
that  Seniime7ital  Education  is  a  good  novel,  it  may  be 
read  with  profit  and  even  with  pleasure  as  the  imaginative 
projection  of  a  close  study  of  the  national  mind  of  France 
in  a  critical  period  of  its  evolution. 

Again  there  was  a  pause  of  years  in  Flaubert's  produc- 
tivity, and  in  1874  he  pubHshed  The  Temptation  of  Saint 
Antony  (la  Tentation  de  Saint  Antoine) ,  the  shortest  of  his 
novels,  if  indeed  that  name  can  be  stretched  to  cover  this 


Gustave  Flaubert  257 

unique  production,  on  which  we  are  told  he  had  laboured  for 
twenty  years.  It  was  a  strange  and  paradoxical  thing,  this 
effort  to  convince  the  thoughtful  of  the  futility  of  thought. 
In  the  nature  of  things  the  book  could  be  interesting  and 
even  intelligible  only  to  those  of  wide  and  recondite  learn- 
ing, for  under  the  veil  of  the  old  legend  of  the  temptation 
of  Saint  Antony  in  the  Thebaid,  a  frequent  subject  of 
medieval  art,  he  has  undertaken  to  exhibit  to  us,  no  longer 
the  folly  of  provincial  mediocrity  as  in  Madame  Bovary,  or 
of  the  desires  and  ambitions  of  Parisian  youth  as  in  Senti- 
mental Education,  or  of  a  sordid  commercial  state  and  an 
ancient  faith  as  in  Sala?7imbd,  but  it  is  the  folly  and  futility 
of  thought  itself  and  of  the  whole  sentient  world  of  which 
he  has  tried  to  put  the  quintessence  in  these  three  hundred 
pages  of  the  most  polished  prose  of  our  half-century.  Ex- 
ternally the  book  has  much  the  appearance  of  a  drama,  the 
speakers  being  indicated,  and  all  description,  whether  of 
scene  or  action,  relegated  to  smaller  type,  but  yet  in  a  style 
as  studied  and  rhythmic  as  that  of  the  speeches  themselves. 
The  book  is  nihilistic  to  the  core,  but  its  pessimism  is 
romantic.  Flaubert's  heart  is  the  victim  of  his  mind.  He 
suffers,  like  Antony  and  Salammbo  and  Fr6d(^ric  and  Emma, 
from  the  pale  cast  of  a  thought  that  is  ever  bruising  itself 
against  reality.  They  all  are  projections  of  the  world-pain 
of  his  generation,  that  undercurrent  of  materialistic  senti- 
ment that  tells  us  in  advance  that  all  our  ideals  are  dis- 
solving views.  So  Flaubert  says  life  seemed  to  him,  even 
when  a  boy,  *'  like  the  smell  of  a  nauseating  kitchen 
escaping  through  a  ventilating  hole.  One  had  no  need  to 
taste  to  know  that  it  was  sickening,"  no  need  to  study  to 
learn  that  knowledge  would  but  increase  unsatisfied  desire. 
Of  this  feeling  the  Temptation  is  the  supreme  expression  in 

17 


258      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

fiction.  The  ethics  in  such  a  case  are  a  matter  of  tem- 
perament, or  perhaps  with  Flaubert,  of  pathology.  The 
art  must  be  a  subject  of  universal  admiration.  The  book 
cannot  appeal,  however,  to  any  but  literary  artists,  and  it 
has  hindered  rather  than  aided  the  appreciation  of  his 
genius,  though  Mr.  Saintsbury  has  pronounced  it  the  best 
example  of  dream  literature  in  the  world. 

llie  Temptation  of  Saint  Antony  was  followed  three  years 
later  (1877)  by  three  tales  which  represent  in  miniature 
the  two  sides  of  Flaubert's  literary  nature  :  the  disgust  at  the 
sordidness  of  modern  life,  and  the  revels  of  imagination  in 
the  reconstitution  of  a  grandiose  past.  The  first  of  the 
tales,  A  Simple  Heart  (un  Cceur  simple) ,  has  for  its  central 
figure  a  servant,  taken  as  a  young  girl  into  the  family  of  an 
average  woman,  leading  an  average  life,  suffering  its  usual 
deceptions,  and  dying  unemancipated  from  its  usual  illu- 
sions. The  story  is  told  with  a  simplicity  and  restraint  that 
is  the  height  of  art  and  pathos,  so  that  it  may  be  both  read 
with  pleasure  and  studied  with  advantage. 

Equal  praise  in  another  kind  may  be  given  to  Julian  the 
Hospitaller  (Julian  I'hospitalier),  the  medieval  patron  saint 
of  hosts  and  hospitality.  Flaubert  finds  the  legend  of  this 
saint  "  in  a  series  of  glass  paintings  in  a  church  in  my 
country  "  and  undertakes  to  tell  with  medieval  naivete  this 
story  of  the  feudal  noble,  hunter,  parricide,  and  penitent. 
The  whole  has  something  of  the  dim  religious  light  of  these 
ancient  stained  windows,  something  of  their  quaintness,  of 
their  sudden  transitions,  and  of  their  atmosphere  of  miracle. 
It  is  as  though  the  author  would  repay  himself  by  this  feat 
of  the  imagination  for  the  restraint  of  the  former  story,  and 
found  in  the  feat  such  delight  that,  St.  Julian  finished,  he 
turned  to  Herodias  and  the  death  of  John  Baptist. 


Gustave  Flaubert  259 

Here  there  is  more  historic  realism.  The  local  colour  is 
studied  in  detail,  though  not  without  an  element  of  the 
grandiosely  romantic,  but  the  wild  discord  of  jarring  fac- 
tions, the  intensity  of  religious  feeling  in  the  seething  brains 
of  these  Galileans,  the  haughty  indifference  of  the  materi- 
alised Romans,  the  morbid  satiety  of  Antipas,  the  satanic 
passions  of  Herodias,  the  heartless,  soulless  grace  of  Salome, 
the  fierce  conviction  of  the  prophet  voicing  itself  in  un- 
bridled denunciation,  all  this  is  as  wine  to  Flaubert's  genius, 
and  it  seems  at  moments  as  though  the  sun  of  Palestine 
had  touched  his  brain  also,  so  that  the  effect  of  the  whole 
may  be  described  as  dazzling ;  yet  whether  the  climax  is 
in  the  scene  of  the  dungeon  or  in  that  of  the  dance,  it 
might  be  hard  to  determine,  so  masterly  are  they,  though 
so  different.  It  is  here  and  in  Madame  Bovary  that  Flaubert 
shows  the  least  effort  and  attains  the  greatest  success.  But 
by  a  strange  and  sad  perversity  of  a  great  mind  already 
verging  on  mania  he  returned  with  saturnine  humour  to  the 
harder  and  longer  task,  and  in  Bouvard and F/ciichet  txtcitd 
a  monument  to  human  stupidity,  '•  the  book  of  his  revenge  " 
he  called  it,  with  all  the  faults  of  the  Sentimental  Education^ 
and  with  none  of  the  redeeming  elements  that  might  over- 
come the  unpleasant  nervous  impression  and  persuade  us 
to  listen  to  his  doleful  lesson. 

Flaubert  marks  in  fiction  what  Taine  marks  in  criticism, 
the  passage  from  idealism  to  realism,  from  the  romantic  to 
the  naturalistic.  He  belongs  to  neither  school  and  unites 
both,  neither  forgetting  his  youthful  admiration  for  Hugo 
and  Chateaubriand  nor  sanctioning  Maupassant  and  Zola, 
who  called  him  master.  It  was  because  he  was  romantic 
that  he  was  a  pessimist,  and  that  not  from  reason  but  from 
sentiment.     His  manner,  his  dress,  countless  peculiarities 


26o     A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

recounted  by  friends  or  betrayed  by  letters,  show  how  much 
of  the  romantic  survived  in  him  to  the  last  to  intensify  his 
disillusion  in  a  materialistic  generation  from  which  he  drew 
his  analytic  temperament.  With  nature  thus  at  strife  within 
him  he  took  refuge  naturally  in  art,  which  he  paradoxically 
regarded,  not  as  a  means,  but  as  having  its  reason  in  itself, 
with  "  truths  as  useful  and  perhaps  more  precious  for  the 
public  than  those  contained  in  the  subject  itself."  From 
this  he  derived  that  studious  objectivity  that  makes  him  see 
his  environments  in  wonderful  detail,  but  takes  something 
from  the  Hfe  of  his  characters,  whom  Bourget  does  not 
scruple  to  dismiss  as  "  walking  associations  of  ideas."  And 
just  as  he  tries  to  make  the  myriad  little  facts  of  environ- 
ment support  character,  so  he  systematically  substitutes 
sensations  for  feehngs,  the  material  image  for  the  thought, 
and  in  thus  making  environment  a  link  in  the  chain  of  asso- 
ciation to  evoke  the  past  he  contributed  materially  to  the 
art  of  novelistic  development,  though  his  own  method  first 
saw  its  full  application  in  the  novels  of  Daudet. 

The  importance  of  Flaubert  to  the  development  of  fiction 
for  good  or  ill  lies,  not  in  his  philosophy,  but  in  his  concep- 
tion of  the  novel  itself  as  the  "  synthesis  of  romanticism  and 
science."  To  take  a  plain,  straightforward  tale  of  common 
life  such  as  that  of  the  servant  in  A  Simple  Heart  or  of 
Fr^d^ric  or  of  Emma  Bovary  or  of  Bovard  and  P^cuchet, 
to  put  it  in  an  environment  that  should  be  minutely  accu- 
rate, and  to  treat  this  "  slice  of  crude  life  "  in  the  most 
finished,  polished  style,  a  style  that  might  win  him  the  title 
of  "  the  Beethoven  of  French  prose,"  that  is  what  Flaubert 
undertook  to  do,  and  it  is  what  the  whole  naturalistic  school 
have  tried  to  do  after  him  —  first,  the  authors  of  Germinie 
Lacerteux,  with  art  more  meticulous  than  manful,  then  2^1a, 


Gustave  Flaubert  261 

in  the  grandiose  romantic  pessimism  of  Germinal^  then 
Daudet  with  subtle  delicacy,  and  Maupassant,  the  genial 
cynic,  and  Huysmans,  and  indeed  all  who  follow  or  have 
ever  followed  the  banner  of  naturalism.  That  he  directed 
the  development  of  the  novel  for  a  generation,  and  that  he 
contributed  essentially  to  maintain  its  place  as  a  work  of 
art,  and  keep  it  from  the  hands  of  the  philistines  of  litera- 
ture, are  his  titles  to  lasting  remembrance. 


CHAPTER  XII 

THE   GENERATION   OF   THE    RESTORATION 

AFTER  the  battle  of  Waterloo  and  the  collapse  of  the 
hopes  of  revolutionary  dominion,  republican  and 
imperial,  of  the  two  preceding  decades,  there  followed  a 
notable  pause  in  the  gestation  of  Hterary  genius.  For  five 
years  the  only  person  of  literary  imagination  to  be  born  was 
the  insignificant  Paul  F^val.  But  when  the  romantic  move- 
ment begins  to  stir  the  adult  population  of  educated  France, 
genius  comes  "  not  single  file  but  in  battalions."  Fromentin 
opens  the  way  in  1820.  Champfleury,  Feydeau,  and  Flau- 
bert follow  in  1821  ;  the  next  year  Feuillet,  Erckmann, 
Murger,  Edmond  de  Goncourt,  Ulbach  saw  the  light,  to  be 
followed  by  Banville  in  1823,  Dumas  the  Younger  and 
Enault  in  1824,  Chatrain  in  1826,  About  in  1828,  and  as  a 
sort  of  aftermath  Ponson  du  Terrail  and  Cherbuliez  in  1829, 
with  Jules  de  Goncourt,  Malot,  and  Fabre  to  mark  the  year 
of  Hernani  and  the  victory  of  romanticism.  This  decade, 
then,  furnishes  nineteen  more  or  less  distinguished  names, 
while  the  preceding  one  counted  but  six  and  the  succeed- 
ing years  to  the  birth  of  Zola  but  nine,  and  all  of  these 
distinctly  of  the  second  rank,  to  be  succeeded  in  1840  by 
another  outburst  of  genius  that  gives  its  character  to  the 
generation  of  Louis  Philippe. 

Of  the  novelists  born  during  the  Restoration,  the  most 
significant  in  the  evolution  of  fiction  is  surely  Flaubert, 
whose  work  and  place  have  just  been  considered.     After 


The  Generation  of  the  Restoration    263 

him  the  most  important,  though  far  from  the  most  popular, 
writers  are  the  brothers  Edmond  and  Jules  de  Goncourt, 
who  show  the  same  delight  in  minute  observation  as  Flau- 
bert, while  they  force  the  elaboration  of  his  style  into  an 
artificiality  that  presages  the  painful  strivings  of  the  symbo- 
lists to  translate  feelings  and  emotions  into  words.  The 
Goncourt  Brothers  have  been  called  the  Chopins  of  litera- 
ture, as  brilliant,  as  sensitive,  and  as  incorrectly  elegant. 
They  had,  as  all  their  studies  show,  an  excessively  acute 
perception  of  the  psychic  impression  conveyed  by  inanimate 
objects.  They  were,  as  some  one  has  said,  "  magicians  of 
letters,"  who  gave  colour  to  sound  and  melody  to  colour  in 
a  "plastic  psychology  "  that  made  all  their  contemporaries 
in  fiction  in  some  degree  their  debtors.  They  attained 
this  by  a  thoroughly  individual  and  intensely  modern  style, 
often  bizarre,  sometimes  faulty,  but  always  supple  and  clear 
and  quick.  They  were  artists  of  such  exquisite  sensitive- 
ness that  their  work  seems  often  brought  forth  in  pain  and 
cherished  with  redoubled  love  because  of  long  public  neg- 
lect. Indeed  the  tardy  recognition  accorded  to  their  fiction 
found  Jules  already  dead,  and  Edmond  an  invalid  broken  in 
health  and  hope. 

Their  work  was  by  no  means  confined  to  novels.  By 
their  discovery  for  France  of  the  art  of  Japan  and  by  careful 
studies  of  their  favourite  eighteenth  century,  whose  social 
life  they  treated  in  many  volumes,  they  won  the  regard  of 
connoisseurs  and  of  a  wider  public.  They  essayed  the 
drama  also.  Indeed  their  first  novel  of  note,  Charles 
Demailly,  was  elaborated  from  an  unsuccessful  play.  But 
their  writing  began  with  fiction,  and  it  is  by  their  fiction 
that  they  exercised  the  deepest  influence  on  the  literature 
of  the  naturalistic  generation. 


264      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

Both  the  Goncourts  were  born  in  Paris.  The  younger 
died  just  before  the  outbreak  of  the  Prussian  war.  The 
elder  lived  till  1895.  They  were  of  distinguished  family, 
and  educated  in  the  best  Parisian  schools.  Deep  affection 
united  them  from  childhood.  Their  instinctive  movements, 
sympathies,  antipathies  were  always  in  accord,  their  ideas 
seemed  born  in  common. 

Their  mother  died  in  1848,  and  the  brothers,  having  a 
small  competence,  resolved  to  devote  their  lives  wholly  to 
art  and  letters.  They  travelled  leisurely  in  France  and 
Algeria,  in  Belgium  and  Switzerland,  and  on  their  return  to 
Paris  in  1850  began  to  write  unactable  vaudevilles  and  a 
novel, /7  18-  (En  18-,  185 1)  which  had  the  ill  fate  to  be 
ready  for  issue  on  the  very  day  of  the  coup  d'etat.  But 
sixty  copies  of  this  book  were  ever  sold,  and  the  story, 
though  since  reprinted  in  Belgium  (1884),  is  interesting 
chiefly  as  an  extreme  example  of  the  affectations  of  dying 
romanticism.  It  is  unintelligible  and  uninteresting  in  mat- 
ter, and  in  manner  disjointed,  rococco,  and  strange.  Ed- 
mond  himself,  writing  in  1884,  says  :  "  It  is  an  exasperating 
search  for  wit,  a  dialogue  whose  spoken  language  is  made 
out  of  bookish  phrases,"  in  a  style  compounded  of  Gautier 
and  Janin.  Yet  the  watchful  critic  may  find  in  it  passages 
of  admirable  description,  showing  the  line  of  future  de- 
velopment, so  that  it  is  "an  interesting  embryo  of  the 
later  romances,"  as  Edmond  remarks,  and  a  curious  antici- 
pation of  the  later  modes  of  thought  of  the  authors,  of 
their  Japanese  taste,  their  determinism  and  pessimism.  It 
was  a  strange  presentiment,  too,  that  the  heroine  of  this 
tale  should  be  a  Prussian  spy. 

Nine  years  later,  in  i860,  the  Goncourts  returned  to  fic- 
tion and  sought  in  Charles  Demailly  to  do  for  the  journal- 


The  Generation  of  the  Restoration    265 

ism  of  i860  what  Balzac  had  done  for  that  of  1839  in  Lost 
Illusions.  The  book  errs  from  exaggeration  and  repetition, 
and  still  more  from  indiscretion,  a  fault  of  which  Edmond 
was  guilty  to  the  last.  It  cost  the  authors  five  hundred  francs, 
and  it  cost  them  also  many  friendships,  for  most  of  the 
literary  men  of  the  day  figure  in  it,  and  if  Gautier,  Flau- 
bert, and  Saint- Victor  are  treated  with  kindness,  Banville, 
Champfleury,  Houssaye,  and  Villemessant  are  handled  with 
scant  respect.  The  morbid,  nervous,  eloquent,  and  extreme 
Demailly  is  more  interesting  than  any  of  these,  for  he  is  a 
composite  of  the  authors  themselves,  a  victim  of  his  sensi- 
tive nature  and  of  an  ill-assorted  marriage.  The  book  was, 
however,  quite  inferior  to  their  next  novel.  Sister  Philomene 
(Soeur  Philomene),  by  which  they  first  began  to  influence 
the  thoughtful  writers  of  the  new  school. 

Sister  Philomene  (1861)  is  a  reahstic  story  of  a  sister  of 
charity  and  of  hospital  life,  founded  on  the  experience  of  a 
medical  friend  at  Rouen,  who  had  seen  a  nun  reveal  in  a 
flash  her  love  for  a  dead  patient,  and  never  again  betray  any 
trace  of  the  sorrow  that  was  eating  her  heart.  The  youth  and 
gradually  maturing  vocation  of  this  sister  is  handled  with  great 
psychologic  insight.  It  is  delicate  and  subtle,  with  greater 
reserve  than  the  later  naturalists  are  wont  to  show,  and  with 
a  little  inclination  to  mysticism.  The  story  is  also  far  bet- 
ter constructed  than  Demailly,  but  what  attracted  and  held 
attention  was  the  minute  description  of  hospital  and  amphi- 
theatre, with  their  tortured,  quivering  life,  which,  however, 
marked  a  dangerous  step  toward  that  topsy-turvy  ideal- 
ism that  was  to  make  the  fancy  delve  where  the  romanti- 
cists had  let  it  soar.  The  novel  becomes  painful  at  times  to 
almost  every  reader,  though  it  is  significant  of  the  tendencies 
of  that  day  that  Flaubert  should  say  that  to  his  taste  there 


266     A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

were  not  in  it  horrors  enough.  This  novel  was  dramatised 
with  some  success  in  1887. 

Renee  Maupeririy  of  1864,  had  for  its  original  title  "The 
Young  Bourgeoisie,"  and  so  marked  a  return  to  a  conven- 
tional respectability.  Here  they  say  they  undertake  "  to  paint 
the  modern  girl  as  the  artistic  and  boyish  education  of  the 
last  thirty  years  have  made  her,"  and  to  show  the  effect  on 
young  men  of  the  success  of  the  parliamentary  regime.  We 
can  trace  the  beginnings  of  this  social  study  in  t\iQ  Journal 
(i.  146)  of  the  brothers  as  early  as  1856.  The  heroine 
and  many  of  the  circumstances  and  minor  characters  of  the 
tragic  story  were  real,  and  in  Denoisel  we  have  another 
composite  of  the  authors  as  they  conceived  themselves. 
Rende,  after  unwittingly  causing  the  death  of  her  brother, 
that  "perfect  model  of  official  banality,"  is  frightened  at 
herself,  lets  fall  "  the  ironical  mask  that  covered  her  virgin 
face,"  and  becomes  before  her  death  a  timid  girl  again. 
This  close  is  of  great  artistic  power,  but,  as  Saint-Victor 
said  at  the  time,  "  the  art  of  the  story  is  effaced  beneath  the 
emotions  that  it  excites,  and  we  are  touched  before  we 
admire."  Critics  think  this  the  best  of  the  Goncourts* 
novels,  and  Daudet  certainly  learned  from  it  much  of  his 
art,  but  it  has  never  won  popularity  and  an  attempt  to 
dramatise  it  in  1886  was  an  utter  failure. 

The  Goncourts  were  now  about  to  produce  the  most 
epoch-making  of  all  their  novels,  Germinie  Lacerteux,  which 
was,  as  they  justly  said,  "  the  model  of  all  that  has  since  been 
constructed  under  the  name  of  realism  or  naturalism,"  and 
so  made  1865  a  cardinal  date  in  the  evolution  of  French 
fiction.  In  their  Preface  they  formulated  their  purpose 
and  that  may  speak  for  them.  "We  asked  ourselves,"  they 
say,  *'  if  what  are  called  the  lower  classes  have  no  right  to 


The  Generation  of  the  Restoration    267 

novelistic  treatment;  if  this  world  beneath  a  world,  the 
people,  is  to  remain  under  a  literary  interdict,  ...  if  there 
are  any  classes  too  unworthy,  misfortunes  too  lowly,  dramas 
too  ill-sounding,  catastrophes  too  ignoble  in  their  terror; 
we  were  curious  to  know  if,  in  a  country  without  caste  or 
legal  aristocracy,  the  miseries  of  the  humble  and  poor 
would  appeal  to  interest,  emotion,  and  pity  as  much  as  the 
miseries  of  the  great  and  rich."  Now  all  this  was  to  claim 
for  the  novel  a  new  function  and  a  wider  scope  as  a  realis- 
tic study  of  contemporary  moral  psychology  and  social 
investigation.  The  Goncourts  were  first  to  make  the  novel 
a  pulpit  for  the  religion  of  humanity,  an  idea  eagerly  em- 
braced by  Zola  and  his  school,  so  that  Germinie  is  histori- 
cally hardly  less  significant  than  Madame  Bovary.  Here 
first  the  morbid  pathology  of  one  vulgar  in  her  virtues  as  in 
her  vices  is  made  the  subject  of  minute  scientific  study,  not 
by  way  of  romantic  contrast,  as  it  might  have  been  in  Hugo, 
but  as  the  centre  and  mainspring  of  all,  as  it  was  to  be  in 
r Assomnioir  and  in  Germinal. 

From  the  QoxizoyxxX.'^'  Journal  for  July  and  August,  1862, 
we  learn  that  persons  and  events  in  the  novel  were  almost  all 
within  the  authors'  own  immediate  experience.  Germinie 
was  their  own  servant ;  Mile,  de  Varandeuil,  that  curious 
survival  of  pre-revolutionary  aristocracy,  was  their  relative ; 
Jupillon,  the  base  minister  to  Germinie's  disease,  and  his 
mother  who  ministered  to  his  vice,  lived  across  the  street. 
But  though  all  might  be  true,  all  was  certainly  sordid,  and 
the  critics  of  good  society  either  protested  with  upturned 
eyes  or  shielded  themselves  in  silence.  None  but  Claretie 
and  Zola  then  recognised  the  book's  significance.  For 
Germinie  Lacerteux  is  the  real  origin  of  PAssommoir,  of 
Nana  and  of  all  her  swarming  progeny.     It  proclaimed  the 


268      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

divorce  between  fiction  and  respectability.  It  made  the 
novel  the  most  effective  means  of  claiming  justice  for  those 
outcasts  of  society  who  "  could  find  on  earth  no  more  place 
for  their  bodies  than  for  their  hearts." 

Manette  Salomon,  which  followed  Germinie  Lacerteux  in 
1867,  marks  the  beginning  of  a  further  development  in 
their  literary  method.  Sure  that  art  could  not  mend 
nature,  they  sought  to  approach  more  nearly  to  the  appar- 
ent lack  of  continuity  that  the  observation  of  real  life  pre- 
sented to  them.  Nature  for  them  should  be  not  only 
unadorned  but  unarranged.  They  would  discard  all  con- 
ventions of  structure.  Their  book  should  neither  have  nor 
seek  artistic  unity.  Its  heroine  should  not  appear  till  the 
one  hundred  seventy-ninth  page  of  what  is  less  a  story  than 
a  series  of  scenes,  masterly  in  their  verbal  precision,  ad- 
mirable in  their  picturesque  detail  of  Parisian  artist  life, 
making,  as  a  contemporary  critic  said,  "  the  work  of  the 
human  brain  as  visible,  as  palpable,  and  as  real  as  life." 
Coriolis,  the  painter,  is  shown  us  on  each  step  of  the 
descent  into  the  inferno  of  union  with  the  reckless  and 
heartless  Manette,  "  to  whom  sex  was  only  form,"  and 
who  sapped  his  soul  till  he  sank  to  imbecility,  as  Demailly 
had  been  harassed  to  mania.  For  to  these  hyper-sensitive 
brothers  woman  seemed  less  an  aid  than  a  fetter  to  genius. 
They  thought  of  her  as  the  men  of  their  favourite  eighteenth 
century  thought,  not  at  all  with  the  mind  of  the  generation 
nursed  on  the  milk  of  Rousseau. 

Manette  Salomon  attracted  but  little  attention,  for  the  times 
were  out  of  joint  and  men's  minds  more  set  on  politics 
than  on  literature.  And  this  was  still  more  the  case  with 
Madame  Gervaisats,  the  last  novel  of  their  fraternal  co- 
operation, containing  some  of  the  greatest  feats  in  all  im- 


The  Generation  of  the  Restoration    269 

pressionist  prose,  but  adhering  so  relentlessly  to  their 
theory  as  to  "  sterilise  their  human  documents,"  to  borrow 
a  phrase  from  Zola.  Daudet,  to  whom  this  story  served  as 
model  for  The  Evangelist^  pronounced  Madame  Gervaisais 
"  the  most  complete,  the  most  incontestably  beautiful,  but 
also  the  most  disdainful  and  haughtily  personal  of  their 
books."  It  is,  once  more,  a  series  of  pictures  of  stages  in 
the  corrosion,  by  morbid  mysticism,  of  a  mind  burdened 
with  culture,  till  at  last  it  succumbs  wholly  to  the  spell  of 
Roman  Catholicism,  hypnotised  by  its  pomps,  its  incense 
and  its  chants.  Of  course,  therefore,  it  called  down  the 
interdict  of  the  Church,  while  the  chaste  censors  of  the 
Empire  pronounced  it  "  a  dangerous,  immoral,  and  anti- 
religious  book."  It  is  in  fact  a  psychologic  study,  coldly 
dispassionate,  of  the  religious  spirit,  to  be  enjoyed  only  by 
the  judicious  few. 

The  coldness  of  the  public  to  their  art  might  have  been 
anticipated,  for  it  had  been  invited  j  but  the  brothers  felt  it 
keenly,  and  it  seems  to  have  hastened  Jules's  death,  while 
for  a  time  Edmond  was  lamed  in  mind  by  his  disappoint- 
ment and  his  loss.  It  was  not  till  1877  that  he  published  his 
next  novel,  Eliza  (la  Fille  Elisa),  of  which  the  subject  was 
calculated  neither  to  disarm  opposition  nor  to  widen  the 
circle  of  his  readers;  for  here  he  descends  beneath  the 
social  stratum  of  Germinie  to  the  brothel  and  the  prison, 
championing  the  naturalistic  theory  of  fiction  to  the  utter- 
ance and  raising  a  decided  storm,  which  raged  long  enough 
to  give  the  author  his  first  commercial  success.  The  double 
purpose  of  the  book  is  to  study  the  psychology  of  prosti- 
tution, and  to  raise  an  indignant  protest  against  the  iniquity 
of  solitary  confinement  recently  introduced  in  French 
prisons. 


270     A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

In  The  Brothers  Zemganno  (les  Freres  Zemganno,  1879) 
he  continued  still  on  the  outskirts  of  society,  giving  what 
many  regard  as  the  choicest  work  of  his  fancy  to  a  study 
of  fraternal  love  in  two  circus  acrobats.  In  a  preface  he 
says  he  chooses  such  subjects  as  these  because  the  life  of 
the  cultured  is  more  complex.  There  is  in  the  book,  as 
might  be  expected,  a  good  deal  of  psychic  autobiography, 
but  it  is  most  remarkable  for  its  vivid  descriptions  of  a 
tinsel  existence  and  the  undulating  or  darting  movements 
of  the  life  of  the  hippodrome. 

In  La  Faustin  Goncourt  passes  in  1882  from  the  circus 
to  the  stage,  and  "  grazes  the  boundary  of  truth  in  his 
search  for  strongly  poetic  situations  "  in  an  endeavour  to 
show,  as  Bourget  puts  it,  "  how  an  actress's  nervous  system 
assimilates  its  environment."  The  novel  is  of  peculiar 
critical  interest  because  it  seems  to  anticipate  by  several 
years  the  next  stage  in  the  evolution  of  fiction,  the  de- 
naturalization of  the  novel  by  the  introduction  of  the 
mysterious,  the  weird,  and  even  the  satanic,  as  we  see  it 
now  especially  in  Huysmans.  In  like  manner  it  might  be 
claimed  that  The  Brothers  Zemganno  had  in  it  the  germs 
of  the  symbolist  movement,  and  Madame  Gervaisais  of  the 
psychism  of  Bourget.  This  is  the  meaning  of  Edmond  de 
Goncourt's  claim  that  he  was  not  only  the  first  to  state 
"  the  complete  formula  of  naturalism  "  in  Germinie  Lacer- 
teuxy  but  also  the  first  to  modify  it  in  anticipation  of  the 
later  schools  of  fiction.     (^Journal^  viii.  242.) 

These  studies  of  low  life  and  of  bohemianism  had  pre- 
pared him  for  Darling  (Ch^rie),  which  he  describes  as  "a 
psychologic  and  physiologic  study  of  young  girlhood  grow- 
ing up  in  the  hot-house  of  the  capital,"  "a  monograph  of 
the  young  lady  in  official  circles  under  the  Second  Empire." 


The  Generation  of  the  Restoration    271 

For  this  book  he  sought  the  co-operation  of  his  feminine 
readers,  begging  them  to  send  him  anonymously  their 
recollections  of  youth  and  first  communion,  of  coming  out, 
of  the  "  perversions  of  music  "  and  the  unveiling  of  "  the 
delicate  emotions  and  refined  modesties  "  of  the  first  sen- 
sations of  love.  Thus  he  thought  to  produce  a  book  that 
should  be  almost  unique  in  its  refined  realism,  "an  approxi- 
mation to  pure  analysis,"  that  "last  evolution  of  fiction," 
whose  realisation  he  left  to  his  successors. 

From  his  feminine  collaborators  he  seems  to  have  got 
very  little,  as  was  natural,  since  the  French  miss  hardly 
understands  herself.  The  Journal  of  Maria  Bashkirtsefif 
was  a  greater  stimulus  to  his  divination  of  the  awakening  of 
girlish  imagination  by  the  sight  of  social  life,  by  music  and 
sentimental  reading,  under  the  stimulus  of  Roman  Catholi- 
cism in  catechism  and  communion,  then  by  dress,  and  the 
development  of  sex,  under  conditions  so  artificial  as  to 
tend  to  nervous  prostration,  that  with  Ch^rie  terminates  in 
anemia  and  death.  The  work  is  done  with  acute  delicacy, 
and  in  a  style  whose  nervous  originality  is  the  quintessence 
of  Goncourt's  last  method. 

In  Darling,  as  in  the  two  preceding  novels,  a  generalisa- 
tion is  followed  by  minute  psychic  descriptions  of  acts  with- 
out logical  continuity,  but  all  leading  to  the  catastrophe. 
In  Elizay  on  the  other  hand,  the  generalisation  follows  the 
acts,  and  for  minor  characters  Goncourt  is  content  to  tell 
what  people  do,  and  leaves  readers  to  determine  what  they 
are,  in  which  he  follows  Taine  and  points  the  way  to  the 
"  scientific  sociologic  "  novel  of  Zola.  His  characters  are 
thus  less  individual  than  composite,  and  as  he  is  always 
intent  on  rendering  action,  his  style  is  sensationalist;  it 
seeks  to  render  first  impressions  in  supple,  delicate,  subtly 


272      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

suggestive  abstractions,  bearing  us  on  through  novel  effects 
of  syntax,  and  nervous  repetitions,  to  an  acuteness  of  sense 
that  responds  to  the  quivering  and  dazzling  of  the  ultimate 
epithet.  It  is  a  style  that  errs  most  often  by  the  intoxica- 
tion of  its  own  virtuosity. 

Of  course  this  is  morbid,  but  it  has  a  very  delicate  poetic 
charm.  All  the  Goncourts*  characters  are  neuropathic,  but 
they  are  drawn  with  great  vividness,  and  endowed  with 
almost  an  excess  of  wit,  though  the  Goncourts  can  touch, 
when  they  will,  chords  of  the  deepest  pathos  and  the  most 
poignant  despair.  They  endeavour  to  be  the  realistic  '*  his- 
torians of  the  present."  "  Write  what  you  see  "  was  their 
guiding  principle.  To  them  fiction  was  "  the  serious,  pas- 
sionate living  form  of  literary  study  and  social  investiga- 
tion, .  .  .  the  history  of  contemporary  morals."  It  lay  in 
their  nature  that  their  realism  should  be  external  rather 
than  psychologic,  that  they  should  merge  individuality  in 
fatalism,  and  so  be  first,  here  as  in  so  much  else,  to 
mark  the  weakness  of  will  that  characterises  modern 
French  literature ;  for  their  pessimism  was  less  rational 
than  emotional,  more  an  artistic  convention  than  a  living 
conviction. 

In  their  style,  however,  they  were  idealists,  seeking 
the  prose  poem,  the  cadenced  period,  the  picturesque 
image,  the  rare  epithet,  even  the  new  word  and  the  sole- 
cism, if  only  they  could  compel  the  language  to  say  what 
it  would  not.  They  were  the  dilettantes  of  emotion,  the 
artists  of  realism,  or,  as  they  said  themselves,  "  the  St.  John 
Baptists  of  neurosity,"  eager  to  "  pin  the  adjective  "  to  each 
significant  little  fact,  having  in  them,  as  a  French  critic  has 
observed,  something  of  Mile,  de  Lespinasse  and  Diderot, 
something  too  of  Poe,  of  De  Quincey,  and  of  Heine.     In- 


The  Generation  of  the  Restoration    273 

tensely  sensitive,  intensely  modern,  their  novels  are  to  fiction 
what  impressionism  is  to  painting,  and  symbolism  to  poetry. 
But  all  who  subordinate  substance  to  form,  statement  to 
suggestion,  health  to  morbidity,  exception  to  rule,  are  in 
so  far  romanticists,  and  so,  in  a  sense,  the  Goncourts  were 
false  to  a  cause  of  which  they  imagined  themselves  the 
martyrs,  and  the  study  of  their  disciples  will  show  that 
this  perversion  of  naturalism  may  become  little  else  than 
romanticism  in  disguise. 

Among  the  writers  of  their  own  generation  the  Goncourts 
stand  apart  with  Flaubert.  Slight  though  essential  contribu- 
tions to  the  development  of  the  naturalistic  movement  were 
made  by  Champfleury,  by  Fromentin,  and  by  Erckmann- 
Chatrain.  Champfleury,  the  pseudonym  of  Jules  Fleury- 
Husson,  is  a  novelist  whom  it  is  easy  to  place  in  the  second 
rank,  but  difficult  to  classify  there.  Most  of  his  work  is 
romantic,  some  of  it  bohemian,  but  his  best  novel  The 
TowrC s-people  of  Molinchart  (les  Bourgeois  de  Molinchart, 
1854),  and  his  essentially  realistic  Chien-Caillou  (1847), 
make  a  connecting  link  between  Balzac's  Scenes  of  Provin- 
cial Life  and  Flaubert's  Madame  Bovary^  and  so  earn  him 
a  place  among  the  precursors  of  the  naturalistic  school, 
whom,  however,  he  did  not  follow  in  its  later  development, 
being  a  quiet  observer  of  the  foibles  of  mankind  rather  than 
a  satirist  of  its  vices. 

Fromentin  wrote  but  a  single  novel,  Dofnenique  (1863), 
which  belongs  to  no  class  but  that  of  masterpieces.  The 
author  was  himself  an  artist,  and  analyses  with  profound 
feeling  and  keen  perception  the  state  of  mind  of  the  artist 
whose  creative  powers  lag  behind  his  ideals.  That  self- 
doubt,  disappointment,  renunciation,  do  not  involve  loss 
of  faith  in  the  ideal  is  the  tonic  moral  of  DonieniquCy  but 


274     ^  Century  of  French  Fiction 

the  sternness  of  its  fundamental  conception  is  irradiated 
by  the  fresh  glow  of  exquisite  description,  and  by  a  striking 
psychic  realism.  Fromentin  is  the  last  important  link  in 
the  chain  that  connects  Saint-Pierre  with  Loti. 

More  popular  but  less  significant  than  either  of  these 
were  Erckmann  and  Chatrain,  who  began  by  being,  what 
at  bottom  they  remained,  romantic  story-tellers  after  the 
manner  of  Hoffmann,  or  of  Auerbach,  but  they  attained  to 
external  realism  in  their  so-called  "  national  novels,"  deal- 
ing with  the  Revolution  and  the  two  Napoleons  in  the  spirit 
of  smug  bourgeois  egoism  that  was  sure  to  rouse  a  wide 
response  in  the  last  decade  of  the  Empire,  when  men  were 
more  willing  than  since  to  listen  to  what  Sainte-Beuve  called 
"  an  Iliad  of  Fear."  Of  their  very  numerous  novels,  the 
best,  which  will  quite  dispense  one  from  reading  the  others, 
are  Madame  Th^rese  (1863),  dealing  with  the  national  up- 
rising of  1792,  and  The  Conscript  0/ 181  J  (le  Conscrit  de 
1813,  1864). 

Some  connection  with  realism  may  be  claimed  also 
for  Feuillet,  who  is,  however,  like  the  novelists  whom  it 
remains  to  mention  in  this  chapter,  essentially  a  survival  of 
romanticism,  "the  family-Musset,"  as  Jules  de  Goncourt 
called  him,  with  some  affiliations  to  George  Sand,  and  still 
more  to  Madeleine  de  Scud^ry.  Like  Flaubert  and  Mau- 
passant he  was  a  Norman,  of  talented  but  nervously  organ- 
ised parentage.  Until  1857  domestic  troubles  compelled 
him  to  live,  with  brief  holidays,  in  his  country  home.  It 
was  here  that  he  wrote,  besides  trifles  that  it  is  quite  un- 
necessary to  name.  The  Little  Countess  (la  Petite  comtesse, 
1856)  and  The  Story  of  a  Poor  Young  Man  (le  Roman  d'un 
jeune  homme  pauvre,  1858).  Then  his  father's  death 
released  him  from  this  country  captivity,  and  in  Paris  he 


The  Generation  of  the  Restoration    275 

developed  a  second  and  far  stronger  manner,  that  found  its 
best  expression  in  Monsieur  de  Camors  {iZd']) ,  Julia  de 
Trecxur  (1872),  The  Diary  of  a  Lady  (le  Journal  d'une 
femme,  1878),  and  The  Dead  Wife  (la  Morte,  1886),  to 
be  silent  of  his  dramas  which  do  not  concern  us  here. 

The  most  pervading  characteristic  of  all  this  work  is  an 
aristocratic  optimism.  What  heroes  and  what  heroines  1 
All  handsome,  all  witty,  all  rich,  even  the  "  Poor  Young 
Man,"  all  fine  riders  and  endowed  with  the  proper  accom- 
plishments of  idle  wealth,  capable  of  enthusiasms  and 
faith,  that  contact  with  practical  life  has  not  blunted,  and 
of  loves  that  in  the  women  become  the  chief  excuse  for 
life  and  occasionally  for  death,  —  in  short,  exactly  the  fiction 
to  attract  the  pinchbeck  aristocracy  of  the  Empire  and  of 
the  women  who  aspired  to  enter  it,  especially  since  Feuillet 
had  the  art  to  season  his  moralities  with  suave  sugges- 
tions of  vice,  making  thus  a  strange  compound,  as  one  of 
his  critics  says,  of  vitriol  and  opoponax,  yet  suiting  deftly 
the  people  of  whom  he  wrote  to  those  by  whom  he  was 
read.  But  the  evolution  of  society  left  him  behind,  and  he 
could  rightly  say,  as  he  was  nearing  his  end  in  1890  :  "  I 
should  write  no  more  even  were  I  to  live.  I  should  not  be 
understood.     Realism  cares  no  longer  for  my  ideal." 

But  though  this  was  for  the  moment  true,  it  is  not  likely 
to  remain  so.  Bacon  assures  us  that  "  the  mixture  of  a  lie 
doth  always  add  pleasure,"  and  when  the  pendulum  swings 
again  toward  the  romantic,  Feuillet's  novels,  or  at  least  four 
or  five  of  them,  will  probably  survive  as  the  best  represen- 
tatives of  that  class  in  our  half-century,  though  it  is  doubt- 
ful if  that  generation  will  be  such  dupes  as  to  select  them, 
with  Lemaitre,  "to  cradle  young  souls  and  enchant  inno- 
cent minds,"  or  to  think  with  Bruneti^re  that  none  since 


276     A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

Provost,  "has  made  the  novel  serve  more  noble  ends." 
The  morality  of  Feuillet,  like  that  of  his  characters  and 
readers,  was  the  thinnest  kind  of  varnish,  a  sentimental 
compound  of  propriety  and  impropriety. 

As  one  looks  back  over  his  twelve  significant  novels,  one 
finds  the  men  shadowy  puppets,  with  the  single  exception 
of  Monsieur  de  Camors,  the  melodramatic  exploiter  of 
mankind,  who  is  an  interesting  though  painful  mixture  of  a 
coxcomb  and  a  prig,  till  he  is  made  a  subject  on  whom  to 
demonstrate  the  superiority  of  Catholicity  to  Honour.  It  is 
impossible  to  take  interest  in  the  others,  hard  even  to 
recall  their  names  without  a  wearied  contempt  and  a  won- 
der how  the  society  they  characterised  could  hold  together. 
But  the  women,  the  martyrs  to  love  and  passion,  crowd 
before  the  eyes  of  fancy.  There  is  the  dainty  *'  Little 
Countess,"  who  loves,  like  Chateaubriand's  Am^lie,  a  mel- 
ancholy Ren^,  throws  herself  at  this  austere  Joseph  in  vain, 
and  then  at  another  for  pique,  to  die  of  unrequited  passion 
at  last ;  there  is  Marguerite,  beloved  of  the  truly  "  Poor 
Young  Man,"  a  prudish  coquette,  compound  of  Breton  and 
Creole,  and  victim  of  such  hypersensitive  aristocratic  pro- 
priety that  when  she  marries  the  "  poor  young  man  "  at  the 
close  we  feel  more  pity  for  him  than  ever.  Then  there  is 
Sibylle,  the  child  who  wanted  to  ride  a  swan,  and  the 
young  lady  who,  rather  than  marry  an  infidel  whom  she 
loved,  preferred  to  die  for  his  conversion,  and  so  set  an 
example  to  her  schoolmate,  the  vulgar  vixen  Clotilde. 
There  is  the  vicious  and  fascinating  Madame  de  Camp- 
vallon,  the  evil  genius  of  Camors,  and  the  feverishly  hysteri- 
cal, heroically  infamous  suicide,  Julia  de  Tr^cceur,  perhaps 
his  most  pathetic  and  artistic  creation.  There  is  Madame 
de  Rias,  of  A  Marriage  in  Society  (un  Mariage  dans  le 


The  Generation  of  the  Restoration    277 

monde) ,  somewhat  exceptionally  weak,  morbid,  and  ill-bred, 
to  be  sure,  but  appealing  to  us  as  a  victim  of  French  edu- 
cation and  society  rather  than  as  an  evil  nature,  as  does 
C^cile  in  The  Diary  of  a  Lady^  a  rather  ineffectual  story 
of  a  group  of  rich,  frivolous,  and  lazy  liars.  A  like  victim 
of  French  marriage  customs  is  the  Baroness  de  Maures- 
camp,  in  The  Story  of  a  Parisian  Lady,  who,  when  her 
husband  has  killed  her  lover  in  a  duel,  tries  to  arrange  for 
his  death  in  a  similar  manner  and  is  respected  by  him  ever 
after.  Then  there  is  the  satanic  temptress,  Marianne, 
whose  just  married  husband  seeks  honour  in  suicide  and 
leaves  her  "  The  Widow  "  (la  Veuve)  ;  and  there  is  the 
blue-stocking  poisoner,  Sabine,  to  point  an  orthodox  moral 
in  a  novel  (la  Morte),  that  Jules  de  Goncourt  said  "was 
fit  to  corrupt  a  monkey ; "  and  lastly  there  is  Beatrice,  who, 
having  wearied  of  adultery,  finally  begins  to  love  her  hus- 
band, when  he,  in  surprised  delight,  kills  himself  for  fear 
she  would  not  keep  on,  and  so  illustrates  "An  Artist's 
Honour  "  (Honneur  d'artiste) . 

These  women  are  all  interesting,  though,  as  a  rule,  they 
lack  principle  and  true  culture.  Most  of  them  are  tempters, 
who  make  the  first  advances,  sybarites  with  idle  hands  and 
empty  hearts  ;  in  short,  the  typical  wife  of  Feuillet  is  a  type 
that  one  hopes  is  not  the  wife  of  anybody  else.  There  is  a 
monotony  in  these  tragic  battles  of  passion  in  women  whom 
Pellessier  has  described  as  ill- balanced,  eccentric,  bizarre, 
incoherent,  wholly  abandoned  to  instinct,  capable  of 
heroism  and  of  crime,  restless,  agitated,  astray,  strangely 
disturbing,  and  already  a  prey  to  that  famous  neurosity  of 
which  Feuillet  painted  the  effects  in  high  society  with  the 
perfect  propriety  of  his  aristocratic  pen,  as  Zola  painted 
them  in  the  lower  classes  with  the  massive  power  of  his 


278      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

brutal  genius.  Feuillet's  own  idea  of  woman  may  be  seen 
in  these  lines  on  the  Parisian  Lady :  "  In  this  strange  hot- 
house of  Paris  the  child  is  already  a  girl,  the  girl  a  woman, 
the  woman,  a  monster.  She  behaves,  sometimes  well, 
sometimes  ill,  with  no  great  taste  for  one  or  the  other,  for 
she  dreams  of  something  better  than  Good  and  worse  than 
Evil.  This  innocence  is  parted  often  from  debauch  by 
caprice  alone,  and  from  crime  only  by  occasion."  "  Wo- 
men are  as  much  at  ease  in  perfidy  as  a  snake  in  shrubbery, 
and  they  wind  in  it  with  a  supple  tranquillity  that  man- 
hood never  attains."  No  doubt  this  seemed  flattery  to  the 
ladies  of  the  Empire,  but  it  jars  strangely  with  the  conven- 
tional accompaniment  of  pseudo-Christian  spiritualism,  that 
in  such  connections  seems  either  ludicrously  naive  or  hypo- 
critically repulsive.  There  is  something  snobbish  in  this 
perfumed  orthodoxy.  But  after  all  reserves  have  been 
made,  Feuillet  remains,  not  surely  a  great  moralist  or  a 
great  creator  of  character,  but  a  very  skilful  story-teller, 
with  a  supple,  light,  lively  style,  excellent,  especially  in 
dialogue,  with  sufficient  humour  and  art  of  sustaining  inter- 
est, who,  as  the  accredited  painter  of  the  aristocratic  life  of 
neuropathic  women  unintelligible  to  themselves  or  to  others, 
contributed  an  essential  element  to  the  development  of 
realism  in  fiction.  His  successors  in  this  field  are  Rabus- 
son  and  Ohnet,  of  whom  the  former  serves  up  aristocracy 
to  itself,  while  the  latter  feasts  the  gaping  admiration  of  the 
socially  ambitious  multitude. 

Another  novelist  who  stands  somewhat  aloof  from  the 
prevailing  current  of  the  fiction  of  his  generation  is  Cherbu- 
liez,  a  born  story-teller,  whose  Genevan  origin  and  wide 
foreign  travel  set  him  somewhat  apart  from  the  French  ten- 
dencies of  his  time.     His  novels  are  usually  of  cosmopolitan 


The  Generation  of  the  Restoration    279 

tourist  life,  such  as  Geneva  might  show.  His  best  charac- 
ters are  foreign,  Russians,  Poles,  English,  Germans,  or  Jews, 
as  the  names  of  his  best  novels.  Count  Kostia,  Ladislas 
Bolskif  Miss  Rovelf  Meta  Holdenis,  or  Samuel  Brohl  and 
Co.  sufficiently  indicate.  They  are  the  condottieri  of  mod- 
ern life,  independent  and  somewhat  exaggerated,  and  the 
plots,  like  the  characters,  abound  in  incoherencies  and  im- 
probabilities. As  some  one  has  said,  they  are  "  novels  of 
agitation  and  delirium  told  by  a  man  of  sober  sense." 
The  descriptions  are  good  and  varied,  but  Cherbuliez  sees 
the  world  from  outside ;  there  is  little  of  poetry  or  mysti- 
cism, the  psychology  is  weak  and  conventional,  and,,  though 
the  story  is  always  interesting,  the  denouements  are  some- 
times infantile,  and  seem  to  belong  to  an  earlier  age  than 
our  nervous  and  tense  generation.  Cherbuliez,  then,  is  the 
representative  of  the  old-fashioned  story-teller,  cheerful, 
varied,  without  a  trace  of  snobbery,  but  with  a  sharp  and 
rather  narrow  irony.  He  is  a  good  literary  journeyman,  with 
a  felicitous,  direct  style,  and  an  admirable  aptitude  for  set- 
ting his  novelistic  sails  to  catch  the  popular  breeze,  grazing 
burning  questions  of  science  or  sociology,  but  always  with  a 
finger  on  the  public  pulse. 

Among  novelists  of  minor  significance  we  note  in  passing, 
that  we  may  not  seem  to  have  forgotten,  About,  a  brilliant, 
witty,  but  very  uneven  writer,  who  reflects  some  of  the  shal- 
lower parts  of  Voltaire's  scepticism.  He  was  wise  enough 
not  to  take  himself  seriously,  and  ceased  writing  fiction 
with  the  fall  of  the  Empire,  whose  frivolity  he  echoed. 

Of  the  novels  of  the  younger  Dumas  it  is  necessary  to  say 
very  little.  They  are  the  first  essays  of  a  man  who  was  to 
win  laurels  in  quite  another  field,  coloured  almost  all  by  the 


28 o      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

sombre  reflection  of  cruel  school-days  that  form  the  subject 
of  the  best  of  them,  the  crude,  bold,  realistic,  epigrammatic 
and  doctrinaire  Clemenceau  Case  (I'Affaire  Clemenceau, 
1866).  The  earlier  novels  are,  by  turns,  humouristic,  med- 
ieval, sensational,  sentimental,  philosophical,  fantastic,  and 
realistically  autobiographic.  The  last  group.  The  Lady  with 
the  Camellias  (la  Dame  aux  Camillas,  1848),  The  Lady  of 
the  Pearls^  (la  Dame  aux  perles,  1853),  Diane  de  lys 
(185 1),  and  Life  at  Twenty  (la  Vie  a  vingt  ans,  1854) 
alone  have  interest  to-day. 

Another  writer  who  soon  abandoned  the  prose  tale  for 
other  fields  was  the  poet  Theodore  de  Banville,  whose 
style  has  a  mellow  warmth  and  delicate  grace,  but  who  is 
too  apt  to  deck  in  fairy  gauze  the  vices  of  the  French  capi- 
tal, so  that  his  stories  have  an  incongruous  air  and  a  false 
ring.  The  same  in  even  greater  degree  must  be  said  of 
Murger's  Life  in  Bohemia  (Vie  de  Boheme,  185 1),  and 
other  stories  that  treat  of  the  peculiar  society  of  the  student 
quarter  of  Paris  in  the  romantic  spirit  of  Gautier's  Young 
France,  Murger's  book,  to  which  we  owe  the  words  and  the 
conception  of  "  Bohemia,"  and  "  Latin  Quarter,"  has  been 
accepted  as  the  best  expression  of  student  and  grisette  life 
in  the  second  romantic  generation,  a  sort  of  classic  of  liter- 
ary thriftlessness  and  dissolute  impecuniosity,  that  has  per- 
suaded generations  of  men  to  look  back  with  dreamy  ten- 
derness on  the  sordid  follies  of  youth,  and  sigh  that  Mimi 
and  Musette  and  Rose  Pompon  are  no  more.  But  in  truth 
they  never  were.  No  vice  is  ever  quite  so  heartless  as  the 
sentimental.  It  is  impossible  to  know  Murger's  life  and  to 
read  his  book  without  impatience,  and  even  nausea,  at  its 
whining  sentiment  and  whimsical  hysteria  of  merriment  that 


The  Generation  of  the  Restoration    281 

masks  so  base  a  reality.  The  Bohemia  of  Murger,  unlike  that 
of  Gautier,  lived  from  day  to  day  with  no  touch  of  exalted 
enthusiasm,  of  scorn  for  the  commonplace,  of  the  ardour 
and  fervour  of  renascence.  It  was  not  calmly  disdainful  of 
politics,  but  naively  indifferent.  Yet,  after  all  reserves  have 
been  made,  there  is  a  verve  and  a  touch  of  nature  in  some 
of  the  scenes  of  Life  in  Bohemia  that  will  long  keep  its 
memory  green. 

In  closing  our  account  of  this  generation  a  word  must  be 
said  of  Feydeau,  an  archeologist  of  repute,  who  leaped  into 
novelistic  notoriety  by  Fa7iny  (1857),  a  daringly  realistic 
psychologic  study  of  jealousy,  to  be  associated  with  Con- 
stant's Adolphe,  while  the  later  novels  of  Feydeau  de- 
serve only  to  be  forgotten.  One  should  note,  too,  as  con- 
tributing to  emancipate  and  stimulate  imagination  in  the 
naturalistic  epoch  that  was  to  follow,  the  very  talented 
translation  of  Poe's  Tales  (1868)  by  the  poet  Baudelaire. 
Meantime  the  appetite  of  \h%  feuilleton-itdi^mg  public  was 
being  satisfied  by  the  voluminous  outpourings  of  novelists 
of  criminal  adventure,  such  as  Belot,  by  the  exotic  sugar- 
and-pomatum  sentiment  of  Enault,  by  the  mild  sensation- 
alism of  Ulbach,  who  may  serve  as  types  of  the  novelist 
invertebrata,  who  produce,  like  polyps,  without  travail  and 
without  individuality,  for  a  public  as  amorphous  as  them- 
selves. But  the  lowest  ebb  of  the  roman-feuilleton  is  at- 
tained by  Ponson  du  Terrail,  whose  fiction  flows  in  a  weak, 
washy,  everlasting  flood  of  childish  impossibilities,  the  like 
of  which  has  not  afflicted  the  world  since  Cervantes  laughed 
the  ghosts  of  chivalrous  romance  out  of  it.  The  antics  in 
which  his  hero,  Rocambole,  who  has  become  a  byword  of 
criticism,  regaled  the  readers  of  the  Petit  Jou7'nal  shall  be 


282     A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

nameless  here.  Finally,  a  worthy  place  apart  surely  belongs 
to  Jules  Verne,  who,  in  tales  familiar  to  every  schoolboy, 
has  successfully  inoculated  science  with  romanticism,  and 
replaces  for  us,  with  tales  of  submarine  ships  and  flying  ma- 
chines, the  interest  that  our  fathers  found  in  the  romances 
of  Monte  Cristo  and  of  Artagnan. 


CHAPTER  XIII 

i;MILE  ZOLA 

PROBABLY  no  Frenchman  of  letters  has  been  so  promi- 
nently before  the  world  during  the  past  quarter-cen- 
tury as  Emile  Zola.  The  literature  that  has  gathered  about 
him  is  exceeded  in  mass  by  that  only  that  has  been  evoked 
by  Renan  and  Hugo,  and  yet  it  is  doubtful  if  justice  has 
been  done  to  the  artist,  still  less  to  the  man,  at  home  or 
abroad,  until  very  recent  political  events  revealed  to  all  the 
magnanimous  character  that  a  too  conscientious  devotion 
to  a  theory  of  art  had  masked  from  those  who  saw  that  the 
theory  was  abused,  and  did  not  know  that  the  artist  and  the 
moralist  were  abused  also.  That  his  art  was  a  refraction  of 
our  beautiful,  and  his  morals  a  deviation  from  our  true, 
should  not  blind  us  to  the  greatness  of  the  one  or  the 
sincerity  of  the  other.  In  art  the  work  suffices  to  praise 
the  master,  but  that  we  may  judge  Zola  aright  there  where 
he  has  been  most  hastily  condemned,  it  is  necessary  to 
know  more  of  his  life  and  methods  of  literary  labour  than 
has  been  necessary  with  his  predecessors. 

Balzac  somewhere  says  that  constant  work  is  a  law  of 
art  as  it  is  of  life,  for  art  is  only  creation  idealised.  No 
one  since  he  died  has  given  such  an  example  of  earnest- 
ness and  indefatigable  industry  as  Zola,  the  most  intense 
and  sombre  of  those  who  have  set  the  mirror  before  the 
baser  side  of  modern  French  life.    But  to  this  earnestness 


284      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

and  industry  there  was  added  an  imagination  hyperbolic, 
idealistic,  and  essentially  romantic.  The  key  to  the  man 
and  to  his  work  lies  in  his  heredity. 

He  was  born  in  Paris,  but  he  is  in  no  sense  a  Parisian. 
His  mother,  a  beautiful,  sweet,  simple  woman,  was  from 
Dourdan  in  northern  France.  At  nineteen  she  had  married 
for  love  the  engineer  Francois  Zola,  whose  father  had  been 
a  Venetian,  and  his  mother  a  Greek  from  Corfu.  Thus 
three  nations  mingled  their  blood  in  him,  and  his  birth- 
place was  a  matter  of  chance,  for  the  Zolas,  were  then  living 
at  Aix,  the  Plassans  of  his  novels.  The  father  was  a  man 
of  intense  energy  and  vast  conceptions,  of  which  the  Canal 
Zola  at  Aix  still  bears  witness.  He  was  a  man  of  ideals, 
somewhat  visionary,  who  had  left  Italy  to  avoid  the  Aus- 
trians,  and  had  travelled  widely  in  Germany,  Holland,  and 
England.  He  was  of  romantic  disposition  and  himself 
something  of  an  author.  From  him,  then,  the  son  might 
inherit  a  taste  for  letters,  a  tendency  to  vast  conceptions, 
energy,  industry,  and  idealism.  But  Frangois  Zola  was  as 
unpractical  as  his  wife  was  prudent,  and  when  he  died 
(1846)  he  left  his  wife  with  the  boy  of  six  and  little  else 
but  claims  that  she  could  not  aiford  to  prosecute. 

The  child  grew  up  under  the  influence  of  his  Northern 
French  mother  and  grandmother,  and  they  with  Dame 
Care  tempered  the  heritage  of  the  father  into  the  iron  will 
of  the  son.  The  grandmother,  a  typical  native  of  Beauce, 
full  of  courage  and  common-sense,  witty  and  canny,  quickly 
assumed  the  direction  of  the  distracted  family  affairs.  Till 
her  death  (1857)  they  lived  at  Aix,  where  the  child's  health 
and  imagination  were  fortified  by  sportive  freedom  in  the 
verdant  wilderness  of  an  abandoned  garden,  the  luxuriant 
Paradou  of  Abbe  Moure fs  Fault.     At  school  the  boy  won 


Emile  Zola  285 


some  distinction  in  French  and  the  sciences  and  showed 
small  taste  for  the  classics,  but  he  had  already  learned  to 
do  the  thing  he  did  not  like.  Even  the  boy  took  duty  for 
his  watchword. 

With  the  death  of  the  grandmother  the  family  fortunes 
collapsed,  and,  after  a  brief  and  not  very  successful  experi- 
ence in  a  Paris  school,  the  youth  of  twenty  thrown  wholly 
on  his  own  resources  obtained  a  wretched  clerkship,  and 
passed  two  years  of  shifty  and  squalid  bohemianism,  in 
which  it  is  hard  to  see  how  he  existed  at  all.  It  was  then 
that  he  learned  to  know  "  how  good  it  is  and  how  sad  to 
eat  when  one  is  starving,"  as  he  makes  wretched  Gervaise 
sob,  with  tears  of  hungry  joy,  in  the  last  pages  of  P  Assommoir, 
At  last,  in  1862,  he  entered  as  bundle-clerk  the  great 
publishing  house  of  Hachette,  and  was  presently  promoted 
to  the  advertising  department. 

During  all  these  years  of  squalor  the  literary  instinct  had 
been  strong  in  him  always.  When  he  could  afford  it  he 
bought  candles,  for  light  and  a  pen  were  more  to  him  than 
tobacco  and  wine.  Obliged  by  poverty  to  live  in  the 
lowest  company,  amid  the  noise  of  carousing  and  de- 
bauchery, he  passed  hours  in  bed  for  warmth,  writing 
poetry  with  chilly  fingers,  and  two  prose  stories,  also  The 
Fairy  in  Love  and  The  Dancing  Card^  now  to  be  read  in 
the  Stories  for  Ninon  (Contes  a  Ninon,  1864),  both 
romantic  fancies  as  different  as  possible  from  all  that  we 
now  connect  with  his  name. 

Gradually  the  stress  of  life  brings  its  lesson,  the  spirit  of 
the  mother  asserts  itself;  he  grows  more  practical,  aban- 
dons poetry,  and  by  the  beginning  of  1864  has  written  a 
volume  of  tales,  the  Stories  for  Ninon,  all  correct  and  pre- 
cise in  style  and  all  romantic  in  sentiment.    This  volume 


286     A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

cost  him  nothing  to  publish,  but  it  brought  him  nothing,  and 
only  My  Lady- Love  (Celle  qui  m'aime)  showed  anything 
of  his  future  power.  It  opened  the  newspapers  to  him, 
however,  made  him  friends  in  literary  circles,  and  thus  he 
was  enabled  to  move  to  reputable  surroundings  from  the 
Bohemia  that  his  sturdy  nature  despised. 

Journalism  and  his  clerkship  supplied  a  scanty  livelihood, 
and  he  satisfied  the  demands  of  his  artistic  nature  by  writ- 
ing a  novel,  Claude's  Confession  (la  Confession  de  Claude, 
1865),  a  failure  that  we  disturb  in  its  limbo  only  to  recall 
that  it  troubled  the  squeamish  censors  of  the  Empire  and 
indirectly  caused  his  withdrawal  from  the  Hachettes  in 
January,  1866. 

From  this  moment  he  was  wholly  dependent  on  his  pen. 
His  fiction  was  still  weak ;  indeed  his  Dead  Woman^s  Vow 
(le  Voeu  d'une  morte,  1866)  was  not  suffered  to  run  to  its 
journalistic  conclusion.  But  his  art  criticism  gave  him 
great  notoriety  by  its  trenchant  and  unconventional  origi- 
nality. It  cost  him  his  post  and  the  favour  of  the  all-power- 
ful editor  Villemessant,  but  from  that  year  he  was  a  per- 
sonality to  be  reckoned  with  in  the  world  of  letters  and  art, 
a  man  with  the  courage  of  his  convictions  and  with 
strength  to  defend  them  at  any  cost. 

Once  more  reduced  to  hack-writing  at  a  penny  a  line, 
such  as  The  Mysteries  of  Marseilles  (les  Myst^res  de 
Marseille,  1867),  he  managed  still  to  steal  from  his  bodily 
needs  time  for  his  art  and  to  produce  Therese  Raquin,  a 
novel  that  all  regard  among  his  best,  and  some  as  his 
masterpiece.  The  hack-work  was  the  better  paid  and  he 
must  eat,  but  he  was  as  true  to  his  art  as  necessity  would 
suffer  him  to  be. 

Up  to  this  time  his  fiction  bad  been  ultra-romantic,  and 


Emile  Zola  287 


the  idea  of  Therhe  Raquin  was  derived  from  the  very 
romantic  V^nus  de  Gordes,  a  commonplace  story  of  a  mur- 
der by  a  wife  and  lover  and  their  trial  for  the  crime.  Zola 
transformed  the  situation  by  a  touch  of  genius.  He  let  the 
criminals  escape  all  earthly  justice,  but  let  them  be  ever 
bound  yet  ever  repelled  by  the  haunting  memory  of  their 
crime ;  he  let  their  love  turn  to  hate,  and  let  them  perish 
the  moral  victims  of  a  divine  vengeance.  The  intensity 
and  minute  vision  of  this  terrible  analysis  of  remorse  are 
hardly  surpassed  in  literature,  but  it  is  a  fierce  and  sombre 
art,  a  morose  pessimism  that  first  reveals  what  Zola  means 
by  "  naturalism,"  a  word  that  he  first  uses  in  the  preface  to 
this  remarkable  volume,  which,  however,  was  long  in  finding 
a  public  to  comprehend  its  excellence. 

Madeleine  Ferat^  his  next  novel  (1868),  is  wholly  inferior 
to  Therese  Raquin^  but  it  adds  the  one  element  needed  to 
complete  his  novelistic  apprenticeship,  the  thread  that  was 
to  bind  together  his  labours  for  the  next  twenty-five  years,  an 
interest  in  the  mysterious  problems  of  heredity,  by  which  he 
maintained,  nursed,  and  fortified  the  fatalistic  determinism 
that  pulses  through  the  Rougon- Mac  quart,  the  most  monu- 
mental achievement  of  French  fiction  since  Balzac.  It  was 
a  daring  conception,  worthy  of  Francois  Zola's  son.  This 
author  of  six  obscure  volumes  of  fiction,  who,  in  making  his 
mark  in  criticism  had  won  more  enemies  than  friends,  pro- 
posed, in  twelve  volumes  linked  together  by  an  hypothesis 
of  heredity,  to  tell  "  the  natural  and  social  history  of  a 
family  under  the  Second  Empire,"  and  so  to  be  "  the  secre- 
tary of  French  society  "  during  that  epoch  as  Balzac  had 
undertaken  to  be  for  his.  The  general  plan  was  thought 
out  and  a  genealogy  devised  to  his  purpose  in  1869,  and  it 
was  necessary  only  to  extend  and  complete  this  original 


288      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

design  when  twenty-four  years  later  the  twelve  volumes, 
now  become  twenty,  were  closed  with  Dr,  Pascal  (1893). 
The  dates  have  interest.  When  the  plan  was  conceived  the 
Empire  promised  a  long  life,  but  before  the  first  volume 
was  published  it  became  necessary  to  condense  into  nine- 
teen years  what  had  been  devised  for  many  more.  Hence 
insuperable  chronological  difficulties  will  beset  the  too 
curious  reader,  though  they  need  not  disturb  a  critical 
equanimity. 

If  in  this  gigantic  scheme  Zola  was  the  true  son  of  his 
father,  he  was  also  the  schoolboy  of  Aix  with  the  marked 
predilection  for  material  knowledge,  and  he  was  also  the 
grandson  of  the  shrewd  lady  of  Beauce.  Having  secured  a 
sure  market  for  uncertain  production  he  married  on  the 
strength  of  it,  accepted  advances  from  his  publisher,  and 
barely  escaped  being  caught  in  the  toils  that  beset  Balzac. 
For  war  came,  in  three  years  he  could  issue  but  two 
volumes  where  he  had  promised  six,  and  it  was  only  after 
the  bankruptcy  of  his  patron  and  by  the  far-sighted  gene- 
rosity of  Charpentier,  his  new  publisher,  that  he  became 
once  more  a  free  man  in  1875,  and  was  able  to  develop  his 
talent  in  years  before  success  had  brought  encouragement 
or  reward. 

On  the  twenty  volumes  of  the  Ron gon- Mac  quart  and  the 
trio  of  The  Three  Cities,  Zola's  reputation  rests  so  entirely 
that  we  may  dismiss  very  briefly  the  short  stories  with 
which  he  relieved  from  time  to  time  the  strain  of  that 
methodical  and  exacting  labour.  All  are  good  and  one  of 
them,  The  Attack  on  the  Mill  in  The  Soirees  of  Medan,  is  a 
masterpiece,  but  they  are  not  necessary  to  Zola's  fame  or 
to  our  critical  appreciation  of  him. 

In  a  preface  to  the  Rougon-Macquart^  dated  July,  187 1, 


^  

Emile  Zola  289 


though  written  in  part  in  1868,  Zola  states  his  purpose. 
He  will  show  how  in  a  family  superficial  dissimilarity  may 
mask  fundamental  similarity,  how  "  heredity  has  its  laws 
like  gravity,"  how  various  minglings  of  blood  and  environ- 
ment may  reveal  the  inner  workings  of  humanity,  so  that,  as 
he  said  in  bringing  his  work  to  a  close,  "  It  is  a  world,  a 
society,  a  civilization.  The  whole  life  is  there,  ...  for  our 
family  have  spread  through  all  contemporary  society, 
invaded  all  situations,  borne  along  by  overweening  appe- 
tite, that  general  modern  impulse  that  snatches  at  enjoy- 
ment and  interpenetrates  our  whole  social  body." 

This  is  what  he  attempted,  but  it  is  not  altogether  what 
he  attained,  and  it  as  well  that  it  should  not  be  so.  It  is  a 
theory  amalgamated  from  Flaubert  and  Taine.  Its  weak 
points  have  been  repeatedly  and  unsparingly  exposed,  and 
it  has  done  much  to  divert  appreciation  from  merits  that 
lie  elsewhere.  Fiction  can  perhaps  be  made  to  reflect  the 
last  light  of  physio-psychology,  but  Zola's  self-styled  "  scien- 
tific experiments  carried  on  in  the  free  flight  of  the  imagi- 
nation "  do  not  do  it,  and  his  aspiration  to  be  "  a  new 
Lucretius*'  remains  a  dream.  He  has  indeed  always  held 
fast  to  the  idea  that  "  truth  alone  can  instruct  and  fortify 
generous  souls,"  and  that  therefore  "to  tell  the  truth  is  to 
teach  morals,  though  it  be  by  a  Madame  Bovary  or  a 
Germinie  Lacerteux.^^  But  his  power  and  fascination  lie 
in  this,  that  it  is  given  him  to  see  truth  with  an  epic  imagi- 
nation, gloomy  and  pessimistic  perhaps  but  grand  and 
masterful,  in  its  painting  of  the  animal  instincts  in  human 
nature,  of  the  bete  humaine  that  possesses  and  tortures  him 
like  a  nightmare,  drags  him  through  vaults  of  human  ordure, 
and  forces  him  to  fix  his  eyes  on  the  bestial  in  man  till  his 
fancy  differentiates  it  into  grandiose  hyperbolical  types  of 

19 


290     A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

relentless  forces  working  out  the  sum  of  human  folly  and 
misery.  He  wishes  to  give  us  slices  of  crude  life,  to  tell 
the  truth,  the  whole  truth,  as  he  sees  it ;  what  he  does  give 
is  not  a  photograph  of  nature,  but  a  poet's  vision. 

That  he  might  speak  of  what  he  knew,  he  laid  the  scene 
of  his  first  novel  in  Aix,  the  town  of  his  childhood,  which 
he  calls  Plassans.  Here,  as  we  learn  from  The  Fo7'iune  of 
the  Eougons  (la  Fortune  des  Rougons,  1871),  was  born  in 
1787  Pierre  Rougon,  whose  mother,  Adelaide  Fouque,  after 
his  father's  death,  had  another  son,  Antoine  Macquart,  and 
a  daughter,  Ursule  Macquart,  and  afterward  developed  a 
nervous  disease  that  had  been  congenital,  though  dormant, 
and  so  appeared  in  various  forms  in  her  descendants  in  the 
second  and  third  generation,  with  whom  we  have  in  the 
main  to  do.  The  children  of  Antoine  sink  to  the  prole- 
tariat of  labour  or  of  vice,  showing  themselves  at  their  best 
in  the  Jean  Macquart  of  Earth  (la  Terre,  1887)  and  The 
Downfall  (la  Debacle,  1892),  with  a  poised  sensuality  in 
the  Lisa  oi  Parisian  Digestion  (le  Ventre  de  Paris,  1873), 
and  with  a  resigned  courage  in  her  daughter  Pauline  (The 
Joy  of  Life,  la  Joie  de  vivre,  1884).  Meantime  the  third 
child  of  Antoine,  Gervaise,  has  developed  the  alcoholism  of 
her  grandfather  and  father,  and  after  serving  as  type  of  the 
self-degraded  working  class  of  Paris  in  P Assommoir  (1887), 
bequeaths  her  tendencies  to  children  who  develop  them, 
—  Claude  into  an  artist's  sterile  but  ever  travailing  genius 
(fThe  Worky  I'CEuvre,  1886),  Etienne  into  the  passionate 
revolt  of  a  socialistic  miner  {Germinal^  1885),  Jacques 
into  the  murderous  mania  of  a  locomotive  engineer  {The 
Beast  in  Man,  la  Bete  humaine,  1890),  and  Nana  (1880) 
into  a  poison-flower  of  vice  avenging  itself  on  the  society 
that  fostered  it,  a  gaudy  fly  incubated  in  the  heat  of  a 


Emile  Zola  291 


social  dunghill,  and  bearing  on  its  wings  a  contagion  of 
pestilence.  Thus  nine  novels  of  the  score  deal  with  the 
lower  social  classes  in  the  city,  the  country,  and  the  camp, 
or  with  vice.  The  bourgeoisie  is  represented  by  the  de- 
scendants of  Ursule  Macquart,  in  whom  Adelaide's  "or- 
ganic lesion "  manifests  itself  either  in  a  mysticism  that 
evaporates  at  the  touch  of  earthly  love  {The  Dreaniy  le 
Reve,  1888),  or  is  intensified  to  a  cataleptic  jealousy  {A 
Page  of  Love i  una  Page  d'amour,  1878).  The  intermar- 
riage of  a  son  of  Ursule  Macquart  with  a  daughter  of  Pierre 
Rougon  will  furnish  us  a  type  of  the  commercial  bour- 
geoisie, restless  and  forceful  in  the  Octave  Mouret  of  Pot- 
Bouille  and  The  Ladies'  Delight  (Au  bonheur  des  dames, 
1883),  while  in  the  celibate  priest.  Serge  Mouret,  this  rest- 
lessness turns  to  religious  mania  {Abbe  Mouret^ s  Faulty  la 
Faute  de  I'abb^  Mouret,  1875).  In  the  Rougons,  finally, 
neurosity  takes  the  form  of  poUtical  ambition  {The  Con- 
quest of  PlassanSy  la  Conquete  de  Plassans,  1874,  and  His 
Excellency ^  Son  Excellence  Eugene  Rougon,  1876),  or  of 
speculative  mania  {Booty ^  la  Curee,  18  71)  and  the  plutoc- 
racy {Money f  1' Argent,  1891),  or  finally  shows  itself  in  the 
scientific  aspirations  of  Dr.  Pascal  (1893). 

As  these  persons  come  in  touch  with  all  sections  of  so- 
ciety, they  give  opportunity  for  a  panoramic  picture  of  the 
epoch,  the  gross  materialism  of  the  urban  multitude  whose 
god  is  their  belly,  the  sordid  monotony  of  the  lives  of 
farmer  and  fisherman  relieved  by  hours  of  morose  bestiality 
and  dreams  of  social  equality  and  avenging  jealousy,  the 
life  of  the  studio  and  the  workshop,  of  petty  tradesmen  and 
the  great  stores,  of  clergy,  bankers,  demagogues,  officers, 
and  aristocrats,  of  those  on  whose  folly  they  batten,  and  of 
those  who  batten  on  their  vices. 


292      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

And  as  Zola  took  his  scenes  from  observation,  so  also  he 
took  his  characters  and  many  incidents  from  contemporary 
history,  always  striving  for  truth,  though  often  attaining 
only  a  refraction  of  it.  The  progress  of  the  work  is  more 
interesting  to  us  than  a  detailed  description  of  the  indi- 
vidual narratives.  The  introductory  volume  and  also  Booty, 
were  written  before  the  war,  though  published  after  it.  The 
latter  gave  him  much  trouble.  How  could  he  treat  realis- 
tically the  life  of  wealthy  parvenus  of  which  he  could  learn 
nothing  directly?  As  a  springboard  for  his  imagination  he 
took  the  house  of  the  chocolate  millionaire  M^nier  in  the 
Pare  Monceau,  but  his  hungry  fancy  could  not  paint  the 
magnificence  of  its  real  interior,  as  in  prosperous  days  he 
learned  to  know  it.  Carriage  builders  furnished  him  de- 
tails for  his  equipages,  and  the  vertiginous  picture  of 
Rente's  conservatory  was  made  from  hours  spent  note- 
book in  hand,  in  the  hot-houses  of  the  public  Botanic 
Garden.  His  facts  and  figures  he  got  from  real  accounts, 
and  also  from  partisan  pamphlets.  He  worked  with  me- 
thodical seriousness  and  neither  sought  nor  excited  scandal. 
For  strong  as  is  Booty,  it  fell  on  evil  times,  and  two  years 
later  an  hundred  and  sixty  dollars  sufficed  to  buy  the  pub- 
lisher's rights  of  a  book  that  has  since  sold  forty  thousand 
copies.  Zola's  ideas  of  fiction  had  not  yet  made  his  talent 
profitable,  but  with  the  stubborn  confidence  of  an  artist,  he 
persevered  in  deserving  success  until  he  attained  it. 

Parisian  Digestion,  his  next  volume,  is  perhaps  the  most 
extreme  expression  of  his  theory,  and,  therefore,  one  of  the 
least  artistic  of  his  works.  It  is,  as  some  one  has  said, 
"  the  symphony  of  eating,"  the  full-fed  epic  of  digestion, 
an  Iliad  of  the  immortal  war  between  fat  and  lean,  where 
the  sleek  bourgeois  triumphs  over  the  lank  bohemian,  very 


Emile  Zola  293 


typical  in  treatment  of  character,  and  quite  too  doctrinaire 
to  be  enjoyed  save  in  its  critical  relations.  Zola's  talent 
has  not  yet  mastered  his  theory.  He  is  riding  his  natural- 
istic hobby-horse,  and  Pegasus  is  waiting.  And  he  will  con- 
tinue to  wait  while  the  author  returns  to  Aix  and  to  quasi 
good  society  to  write  of  the  political  Conquest  of  Plassans 
with  as  little  enthusiasm  as  success. 

Criticism  will  accord  a  much  higher  place  to  Abbe  Mou- 
ret^s  Faulty  for  it  will  discern,  what  contemporaries  failed 
to  see,  the  beginning  of  his  literary  emancipation  from 
compilation  and  documents.  The  Roman  ritual,  Liguori, 
and  a  Kempis  gave  him  much,  but  only  the  poet's  fancy 
sporting  with  childhood's  memories  could  create  the  swell- 
ing life  of  that  wild  southern  Paradou,  whose  exuberant  and 
heavy  odours  give  a  fit  atmosphere  to  the  morbid  passion  of 
the  tale.  He  had  already  written  fine  studies  of  intense 
and  morbid  character,  but  in  this  poet's  dream  lay  the  con- 
secration of  his  genius  and  it  is  this  that  gives  to  Abbe 
Moure t  's  Fault  its  exceptional  interest,  while  its  successor, 
His  Excellency,  owed  its  immediate  success  to  its  supposed 
picture  of  Napoleon's  prime  minister,  Rouher,  and  has 
interest  to-day,  not  as  a  story  or  as  a  work  of  art,  but  for 
supposed  traces  of  psychic  autobiography.  For  Zola,  like 
his  Rougon,  loves  power  because  it  glorifies  the  force  that 
is  in  him  and  is  virtuous  for  no  divine  reward,  but  because 
virtue  is  an  element  of  strength. 

We  are  brought  thus  to  the  eve  of  Zola's  first  great 
success.  He  had  written  twelve  volumes  of  fiction  in  as 
many  years.  No  doubt  he  seemed  to  others  one  of  those 
novelists  by  the  dozen  who  can  always  sell  2000  copies 
but  never  20,000.  Perhaps  he  seemed  so  to  himself. 
Daudet,  whom  he  knew  well  at  this  time,  suggests  as  much. 


11 


294     ^  Century  of  French  Fiction 

He  had  more  reason  to  be  discouraged  than  ten  years 
before.  And  he  was  about  to  achieve  an  immediate  and 
immense  success  by  a  book  constructed  like  its  prede- 
cessors from  experience,  from  observation,  and  from  books. 
What  was  the  spark  in  fAssomnioir  that  set  the  Hterary 
world  afire?  It  was  that  he  brought  the  poetic  glow  of 
Abbe  Mouret  ^s  Fault  from  the  far-off  country  presbytery  to 
the  heart  of  Parisian  popular  life.  He  had  seen  these 
tenements,  these  festivals  and  funerals,  he  knew  in  his 
own  body  that  hunger,  cold,  and  squalor,  that  "  slow  dying 
of  the  poor,  empty  bellies  crying  for  hunger,  the  necessities 
of  beasts  snuffling  with  chattering  teeth  at  unclean  things 
in  this  great  Paris  so  gilded  and  so  gay."  He  knew 
these  things,  as  the  authors  of  Germinie  Lacerteux  did 
not  know  them,  and  he  treated  them  with  an  epic  sweep 
that  was  his  alone.  He  supplemented  his  experience  by 
special  studies,  and  threw  an  atmosphere  of  sordid  reality 
about  the  whole  by  choosing  the  language  of  his  characters 
for  that  of  his  narration  also.  Then  he  took  his  great 
mass  of  linguistic  and  social  notes  to  the  seashore  and 
methodically  elaborated  this  story  of  pity  and  of  terror 
with  a  mathematical  precision  of  which  the  Italian  critic 
Amicis  has  given  a  minute  and  curious  description.  The 
persons  were  first  enumerated  and  characterised  as  in  a 
police  register,  then  the  action  was  sketched  and  each  scene, 
even  in  its  sub-divisions,  assigned  appropriate  space,  so 
that  the  whole  might  have  an  architectural  harmony  and 
proportion.  It  is  only  after  two  or  three  months  of  this 
preliminary  study,  and  he  made  such  for  all  his  novels, 
that  he  becomes,  as  he  has  said,  "  master  of  this  kind  of 
life,  feels  it,  lives  it  in  imagination,  as  Balzac  used  to  do, 
and  is  sure  that  he   can  give  to  it  its  special  colour  and 


Emile  Zola  295 


odour  and  language,"  aiming  at  scientific  psychology  and 
logical  continuity  but  realising  always  that  the  virus  of 
romanticism  is  strong  in  him  still. 

A  natural  result  of  this  method  is  that,  as  his  talent 
develops  with  success,  he  comes  to  describe  temperaments 
rather  than  characters,  types  rather  than  individuals, 
masses  rather  than  men ;  and  that  is  why  the  method  of 
Abbe  Mouret  first  realises  its  possibilities  in  l Assoinmoir, 
to  pass  from  strength  to  strength  through  Germinal  to 
The  Downfall.  The  central  figure  in  VAssommoir  is  not 
Gervaise,  the  wretched  washerwoman  who  gropes  her  way 
in  sordid  misery  and  wrecks  herself  on  brutal  vice,  but 
rather  the  Dram-Shop,  that  manufactory  of  sin  and 
crime,  with  its  panting  distillery  whose  snaky  coils  ooze 
their  alcoholic  sweat  like  a  slow,  persistent  spring.  The 
whole  is  an  apocalyptic  epic  of  social  putrefaction,  star- 
vation, delirium,  in  which  all  figures  are  typical  of  the 
fearful  struggle  of  the  submerged  for  a  life  that  stifles 
ideals,  inevitably  involves  its  own  disappointment,  and  is 
not  only  of  the  earth  earthy,  but  of  the  dirt  dirty,  a  grandi- 
ose evocation  of  topsy-turvy  idealism. 

This  is  the  fittest  place  to  speak  of  a  quality  in  Zola's 
work  that  more  than  any  other  has  injured  it  and  its  author 
in  the  esteem  of  the  literary  public  at  home  and  abroad. 
I  mean  his  voluntary  crudity  of  language  and  persistent 
mention  of  the  unmentionable.  This  attained  its  extreme 
expression  in  Earth,  ten  years  later.  It  had  found  ample 
expression  before,  especially  in  Booty,  but  first  in  V Assommoir 
it  attracted  general  notice  and  very  general  denunciation. 

Base  men  think,  speak,  and  act  basely  in  life,  and  they 
do  so  in  VAssommoir.  Many  men  not  base  have  moments  of 
baseness  or  of  bestiality,  and  Zola  attributes  such  to  men  in 


296     A   Century  of  French  Fiction 

whom  virtue,  or  at  least  respectability,  predominates.  If 
he  did  not,  he  would  seem  to  himself  to  be  writing  a  lie, 
deluding  his  public  into  a  false  social  security.  He  believes, 
for  instance,  that  the  social  condition  of  workmen  in  the 
faubourgs  of  Paris  cries  out  for  reform,  that  it  is  a  pes- 
tiferous environment,  in  which  drunkenness  and  laziness 
relax  family  ties  till  all  honest  feeling  is  submerged  in 
promiscuity,  shamelessness,  and  death.  What  he  sees  is 
indeed  not  typical  or  normal,  but  rather  his  vision  of 
whither  society  is  tending.  He  thinks  it  true,  however, 
and  means  it  so  well  that  he  is  willing  to  endure  the  de- 
nunciation that  his  picture  of  it  invites.  V Assommoiry 
he  says,  *'is  morality  in  action,  the  most  chaste  of  my 
books,  ...  the  first  story  of  the  people  that  has  the  true 
scent  of  the  people."  "  I  do  not  defend  myself,  my 
work  will  defend  me.  It  is  a  true  book,"  a  story  of  men 
not  bad  by  nature  but  made  bad  by  an  environment  of 
ignorance,  poverty,  and  toil. 

In  all  this  Zola  was  absolutely  sincere,  filled  with  pro- 
found sympathy  for  society's  victims  and  bent  on  serious 
diagnosis  of  social  ills.  He  knew  that  he  invited,  and 
probably  expected,  misrepresentation.  It  is  a  sad  truth 
that  many  men  derive  an  unavowable  and  morose  satis- 
faction from  reading  the  unutterable  and  seeing  the  obscene. 
Doubtless  this  motive  impelled  some  of  the  eighty  thou- 
sand who  in  three  years  bought  V Assommoir  after  their 
attention  had  been  called  to  it  by  the  efforts  of  critical 
Mrs.  Grundys  to  warn  a  smug  and  confiding  public  to 
beware  this  man  of  sin.  But  Zola  is  writing  for  neither 
the  smug  nor  the  prurient.  He  is  trying  to  tell  thoughtful 
men  what  bourgeois  democracy  and  the  Second  Empire 
have  made  of  the  French  people. 


Emile  Zola  297 


Yet  in  absolving  the  man  we  do  not  acquit  the  artist, 
^he  nastiness,  the  blasphemy  of  some  melancholy  pages 
in  the  Rougon-Marquart  may  be  true  in  the  sense  that 
each  detail  is  true,  but  they  are  not  true  as  a  whole  and 
they  are  not  artistic.  Zola  mars  his  effects  by  overload- 
ing his  colours  and  falls  on  the  side  to  which  he  inclines. 
Truth  is  beautiful  only  when  it  is  normal,  natural.  The 
naturalists,  so-called,  are  ever  giving  us  the  ^jiormal,  the 
ideally  base.  L'Assommoir,  Nana,  Earthy  and  The  Beast 
in  Man  are  to  nature  what  an  anatomical  museum  is  to 
the  palestra.  Both  have  their  value.  But  the  strength 
of  Zola  is  not  here.  We  deplore  these  excesses  of  a 
mistaken  esthetic,  but  they  must  not  blind  us  to  his  moral 
sincerity  or  to  his  rare  artistic  power. 

Had  there  been  aught  of  the  pander  in  his  nature  it 
would  have  been  easy  to  follow  PAssommoir  with  another 
story  of  the  gutter,  or  to  turn  from  squalid  to  venal  vice. 
He  followed  rather  his  artist's  instinct  that  led  him  from 
the  Place  de  la  revolution  to  the  Trocad^ro,  from  broad 
popular  frescos  to  A  Page  of  Love,  a  miniature  of  a  child's 
morbid  jealousy  and  a  mother's  passion,  worked  out  in  five 
symmetrical  parts,  each  closing  with  a  picture  of  Paris  in 
sunshine,darkness,  or  tempest,  that  makes  the  city  a  material 
symbol  of  psychic  crisis  or  calm. 

When  he  had  thus  satisfied  his  poetic  nature  and  sought 
the  seclusion  of  country  life  at  M^dan,  he  turned  resolutely 
to  do  the  thing  he  did  not  like,  the  most  difficult  and  dis- 
tasteful thing,  but  the  thing  that  he  must  do  if  in  his  moral 
and  social  picture  of  the  Second  Empire  he  would  not  mask 
the  foreground  with  a  fig-tree.  Corrupt  and  venal  women  had 
been  among  the  most  prominent  figures  of  that  epoch,  and 
Zola  has  sought  to  give  us  epic  types  of  them  in  his  Nana, 


298      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

Himself  of  eminently  correct  private  life,  and  having  been 
in  youth  an  unwilling  witness  of  the  baser  side  only  of  vice, 
he  sought  help,  with  a  seriousness  that  is  not  without  its 
humour,  in  the  garrulous  memory  of  old  beaux  and  in  the 
morose  fancies  of  Otway.  The  result,  as  a  whole,  is  un- 
pleasant, though  not  perhaps  unedifying ;  but  the  book  has 
passages  of  wonderful  power,  and  the  close  is,  as  he  said, 
the  most  weird  and  successful  thing  that  he  had  ever  writ- 
ten. Even  now  it  would  be  hard  to  match  that  death  scene 
in  the  upper  room  of  the  great  hotel,  where  Nana  lies  dis- 
solving in  small-pox  while  frantic  crowds  below  are  shouting ; 
"To  Berlin!  To  Berlin!" 

As  after  PAssommoir,  so  now  Zola  turned  from  the  Paris- 
ian cesspool  to  a  country  scene  and  had  begun  to  write 
The  Joy  of  Living  (la  Joie  de  vivre)  when  the  death  of  his 
mother,  October,  1880,  led  him  to  seek  relief  from  the 
painful  story  of  Pauline  Quenu's  unselfish  suffering  in  a 
satire  of  the  smugly  corrupt  Parisian  bourgeoisie,  that  seemed 
to  his  poetic  vision  a  sort  of  soup-stock  kettle,  where  scraps 
and  refuse  of  good  food  were  ever  simmering  and  sending 
up  their  scum.  Therefore  he  called  his  story  Pot-bouille. 
He  made  great  efforts  to  be  accurate,  even  in  minute 
details,  and  sought  realistic  effects  in  technic  by  restricting 
descriptions,  blending  several  actions,  and  exhibiting  them 
in  disconnected  scenes,  as  an  observer  in  real  life  might 
see  them,  —  a  device  that  he  borrowed  from  the  Goncourts. 
But  his  avowed  model  was  Flaubert's  Sentimental  Education, 
He  sought  to  be  anti-romantic,  clear,  condensed,  to  put,  as 
he  said,  a  drag  on  himself  and  to  "  finish  flatly."  And  it  is 
because  Pot~botcille  aspires  to  the  faults  of  Flaubert's  novel 
that  it  fails  to  please  critics  or  readers.  Zola's  imagination 
struggles  here  with  the  pettiness  of  his  subject  and  method, 


Emile  Zola  299 


and  creates  at  last  a  gloomy,  unreal  world,  where,  as  some 
one  has  said,  the  porters  talk  Hke  poets  and  other  people 
like  porters,  and  where  society,  like  the  children,  is  sick  or 
ill-bred.  That  his  talent  was  not  reahstic  he  had  never  shown 
so  clearly  as  here.  But  the  commercial  side  of  his  subject 
attracted  him,  and  he  followed  Pot-bouille  with  The  Ladies' 
Delight  (Au  bonheur  des  dames),  a  study  of  the  great  de- 
partment store,  with  its  socialistic  or  coUectivist  tendencies, 
in  all  aspects  of  which  he  took  a  very  keen  interest,  striving 
to  enter  into  the  material  and  mental  life  of  clerks  and 
petty  shop-keepers,  delving  in  the  mysteries  of  kleptomania 
and  the  temptations  of  show-windows  and  bargain-days, 
and  producing  an  economic  study  of  some  interest,  but  a 
novel  of  very  little.  This  was  not  the  field  for  his  triumphs, 
nor  did  he  find  it  in  his  next  essay.  The  Joy  of  Livings  a 
sombre,  pathetic  study  of  silent,  gentle,  magnanimous  girl- 
hood falling  victim  to  egoism,  hke  Balzac's  Pierrette,  in  her 
fortune  and  in  her  love. 

Zola  could  not  have  expected  commercial  success  for  a 
story  like  this.  Pathos,  to  be  popular,  must  be  sentimental. 
His  appeal  was  to  the  few  who  see  hfe  steadily  and  whole. 
His  epic  breadth  finds  some  scope  here  in  the  multitudinous 
sea,  but  it  was  to  appeal  more  effectively  both  to  the  judi- 
cious and  to  the  multitude  when  its  subject  was  human 
nature ;  and  so  Germinaly  that  great  prose  poem  of  the 
strike  and  mine,  is  a  masterpiece  in  which  all  his  talents 
find  their  full  development,  more  even  than  in  V Assommoir. 
Ideal  it  was,  but  real,  too,  in  the  higher  sense.  Every 
"  coron "  of  miners  in  France  and  Belgium  has  its  well- 
thumbed  copy  to  attest  the  book's  broad  truth  to  nature. 
It  is,  as  Zola  said,  a  great  fresco,  so  filled  with  figures  that 
all  must  be  simplified,  some  only  suggested,  and  the  whole 


300      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

composition  foreshortened.  The  treatment  is  typical. 
Etienne  is  any  workman  into  whose  brain  socialism  has 
percolated  and  become  a  fixed  idea ;  Maheude,  any  woman 
whom  slow  exasperation  of  suffering  goads  from  resignation 
to  revolt ;  Catherine,  society's  victim,  crowded  step  by  step 
to  the  last  verge  of  pain  and  suffering.  And  so,  too,  the 
millionaire  Gr^goire  is  but  a  type  of  serene  egoism,  of  the 
incapacity  of  the  rich  to  understand  why  workmen  should 
be  discontented  to  labour  for  their  luxury;  and  superin- 
tendent Jeanlin  is  typical  of  the  masterful  fidelity  of  an 
officer  in  the  army  of  labour.  The  magnificent  descriptive 
scenes  are  treated  in  the  same  spirit.  The  strikers  as  they 
march  past,  haggard  men  and  ragged  hags,  shrieking  the 
Marseillaise  and  keeping  a  rude  time  to  it  with  the  clatter- 
ing of  their  wooden  shoes,  brandishing  tools  for  weapons, 
and  shouting  the  monotonous  menace.  Bread,  Bread,  Bread, 
are  a  symbol  of  the  revolt  of  brutaHsed  labour.  What  if 
their  cry  be  silenced  with  bullets?  We  feel  that  it  has 
marked  another  hour  in  labour's  night  and  brought  one  step 
nearer  the  dawn  of  a  new  social  day. 

Of  course  the  action  and  reaction  of  mass  and  individual 
demands  a  magnifying  of  details,  but  here,  at  least,  Zola 
has  avoided  distortion,  for  these  colliers  force  themselves  on 
the  mind  with  a  vivid,  nightmare  life  that  makes  their  very 
filthiness  and  squalor  seem  as  natural  to  us  as  their  hopeless, 
socialistic  yearnings.  And  over  all  there  dominates  the 
pumping  engine,  a  symbol  of  soulless,  restless,  panting  life, 
vague,  yet  ever-present,  till  it  is  swallowed  up  at  last  in  the 
collapsing  pit,  as  though  it  were  incarnate  society  that 
had  undermined  its  own  base,  struggling  with  futile  des- 
peration against  an  inexorable  fate,  and  leaving  behind  for 
our  sole  consolation  an  eternal  hope  in  the  "germinal" 


^  

Emile  Zola  301 


forces  of  nature,  from  which  a  new  and  better  order  may 
arise. 

To  maintain  such  a  height  as  this  is  given  to  no  novehst, 
and  in  The  Work  Zola  has  done  Httle  more  than  expand 
the  idea  of  Balzac's  Unknown  Masterpiece  into  a  volume. 
In  this  "pure  psychology  of  art  and  passion,"  where  an 
illusive  ideal  drives  an  artist  to  mania,  there  are  interesting 
bits  of  autobiography,  but  the  book  is  insignificant  in  com- 
parison either  to  Germinal  or  to  Earthy  that  immediately 
followed ;  for  this  last  is  a  picture  of  human  bestiahty  that 
would  be  unique  in  literature  were  it  not  for  the  morose 
fancies  of  Swift.  It  is  false,  but  it  is  grandly  false.  We 
cannot  but  marvel  at  the  atmosphere  of  fecundity  that 
breathes,  pollen-laden,  through  the  whole. 

No  book  of  Zola  was  received  with  such  angry  indigna- 
tion and  patriotic  protest.  But  even  before  its  pubHcation 
he  had  cleansed  his  wings  for  a  flight  into  the  blue,  and  was 
meditating  that  precious  mystic  Dream^  an  exquisite  idyl, 
yet  based  like  all  his  work  on  minute  and  careful  studies. 
But,  though  he  called  his  book  "a  scientific  experiment 
carried  on  in  the  free  flight  of  imagination,"  it  is  but  one 
more  evidence  of  the  fundamental  romanticism  of  Zola's 
genius.  And  the  same  romanticism,  though  topsy-turvy 
now,  riots  in  The  Beast  in  Man,  which  has  homicide  for 
its  theme  and  the  locomotive  for  its  symbol ;  a  sad  failure  as 
a  scientific  novel,  but  very  remarkable  as  a  grandiose  vision 
of  the  Railway.  The  description,  at  the  close,  of  the  runa- 
way train  dashing  by,  filled  with  howling  soldiers,  rushing 
to  disaster  and  disappearing  in  a  cloud  of  steam  and  smoke 
and  fire,  is  such  as  no  other  novelist  of  our  century  could 
have  written. 

Wealth  had  thus  far  had  small  place  in  Zola's  fiction. 


302      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

In  Money  we  live  in  a  world  of  speculation  and  of  intan- 
gible values,  a  theme  apparently  well  suited  to  Zola's  talent, 
so  that  it  is  difficult  to  understand  why  this  novel  of  the 
Stock- Exchange  is  comparatively  ineffectual.  But  it  is 
clear  that  for  one  whose  greatest  triumph  had  been  in 
Germinal  ihtvQ  remained,  as  the  subject  of  all  others,  War. 
Here  he  was  sure  to  be  at  his  best  and  sure  of  an  audience 
as  wide  as  the  French  republic.  Zola  had  not  served  in 
the  war  of  1870,  but  all  confirm  the  essential  faithfulness  of 
The  Downfall.  We  need  not  follow  him  as,  foot  by  foot, 
he  examines  his  scene  and  gathers  facts  from  peasants  and 
citizens.  The  characters,  as  in  Genninal,  are  types,  each 
representing  one  of  the  states  of  soul  that  the  Empire  had 
tended  to  produce.  But  its  power  and  its  glory  are  not  in 
individuals  but  in  masses,  in  armies  concentrating  with  fatal 
precision  around  Sedan,  in  regiments  on  the  march,  or 
herded  in  cattle-cars  or  prison-pens,  or  surging  through 
bloody  Bazeilles  or  blazing  Paris,  or  lying  under  fire,  or 
charging  to  destruction,  while  the  rhythmic  recurrence  of 
Napoleon's  baggage  train  punctuates  with  scathing  irony 
the  imperial  downfall. 

It  remained  for  Zola  to  sum  up  for  us  the  lesson  of  his 
theory  of  atavism.  He  has  essayed  his  vindication  and 
justification  in  Dr.  Pascal^  a  book  with  some  fine  passages, 
others  extremely  disagreeable,  and  little  interest  save  as  it 
gathers  together  the  threads  of  the  preceding  volumes  with 
the  ultimate  moral  that  men  should  have  faith  in  nature, 
should  stake  their  hopes  on  work  and  on  science,  and  so 
become  at  last  masters  of  destiny. 

Such  is  the  lesson  also  of  the  triad  that  has  followed  the 
Rougon- Mac  quart  The  central  thought  in  Lourdes,  Rome, 
and  Paris  is,  first,  that  emotional  mysticism  is  a  morbid 


Emile  Zola  303 


compound  of  passion  and  pettiness,  pity  and  bathos,  sure 
to  be  exploited  by  the  spirit  of  ecclesiastical  commercial- 
ism. Then  when  his  hero  is  repelled  by  the  actual  church 
he  takes  refuge  in  the  ideal  of  the  neo-Christian  socialists ; 
and  when  that  too  fails  he  "  makes  haste  to  bury  a  dying 
religion  lest  its  ruins  should  infect  the  nations,"  and  in 
Paris  proclaims  that  human  happiness  "can  spring  only 
from  the  furnace  of  the  scientist."  But  throughout  the 
reader  is  attracted  less  by  the  doctrine  than  by  the  art,  in 
Lourdes  by  the  processions  and  pilgrimages,  in  Rome  by 
the  contrasts  of  antique,  old,  and  new,  symbolized  in  the 
Palatine,  the  Vatican,  and  the  Quirinal,  in  Paris  by  the 
long  conflict  between  delusions  that  flatter  and  truth  that 
frees,  a  struggle  to  end  only  with  a  Twilight  of  the  old 
Gods  and  a  full  faith  in  Nature. 

This  philosophy  of  life  is  a  revolt  against  Roman  Cathol- 
icism as  France  knows  it.  It  is  not  necessarily  anti-Chris- 
tian. Its  ultimate  base,  as  we  see  from  Dr.  Pascal^  is 
instinct  rather  than  science.  He  sees  that  the  character  of 
most  men  is  determined  by  heredity  and  circumstance,  but 
even  in  the  unfree  he  recognises  the  potentiality  of  freedom 
as  a  strict  determinist  could  not  do,  and  so  these  struggles 
between  religion  and  science,  between  heart  and  brain,  that 
from  first  to  last  give  these  twenty-three  volumes  unity  of 
aim  in  their  mass  of  detail,  are  but  one  more  witness  to  the 
human  craving  for  rest,  one  more  failure  to  penetrate  the 
ultimate  meaning  of  hfe.  But  where  genius  is  so  fertile 
and  so  courageous  the  effort  is  its  own  reward.  If  he  has 
pitilessly  laid  bare  the  pretentious,  mockery  and  hypocriti- 
cal morality  in  much  of  what  passes  for  religion  and  good- 
breeding  he  has  been  as  merciless  to  confident  materialism 
and  that  hedonistic  fatalism  that  weakens  the  will  by  which 


304      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

alone  happiness  in  self-control  is  won.  His  work  has  grown 
more  virile  with  the  years.  It  has  discarded  the  excesses 
of  a  mistaken  esthetic  and  gained  in  tonic  earnestness.  He 
was  always  a  force  to  be  reckoned  with.  He  has  become 
a  force  with  which  we  are  glad  to  reckon. 


CHAPTER    XIV 


ALPHONSE   DAUDET 


THE  most  graceful  of  modern  French  humourists,  their 
most  sympathetic  satirist,  and  their  most  charming, 
if  not  their  deftest  story-teller,  is  Alphonse  Daudet,  who 
was  born  by  a  curious  coincidence  in  the  year  and  province 
of  the  birth  of  Zola.  Both,  then,  were  natives  of  Provence, 
both  heirs  of  its  warm  sun,  that  gave  to  the  genius  of  the 
one  its  vertiginous  imagination,  and  ripened  in  the  other  a 
literary  wine  of  most  exquisite  flavour.  Daudet  has  left  us 
in  Little  Thingumy  (le  Petit  Chose)  one  of  the  most  de- 
lightful bits  of  child  autobiography  in  literature.  Born  in 
a  well-to-do  manufacturer's  family,  a  reverse  of  fortune 
compelled  him  in  youth  to  seek  the  wretched  post  of 
usher  in  a  school  at  Alais,  after  having  nursed  literary 
dreams  in  a  novel  never  published,  and  now  lost  beyond 
hope  of  recovery.  After  a  year  of  slavery  he  left  in 
desperation  that  "  Dotheboys  Hall  "  and  joined  his  almost 
equally  penniless  brother^  Ernest,  who  has  since  become  a 
worthy,  though  mediocre  novelist  and  historian,  at  Paris  in 
November  of  1857. 

Here  he  tried  to  support  himself  by  literature,  at  first  as 
a  poet,  then  by  prose  contributions  to  the  Figaro,  which 
paid  better,  though  ill.  <*  We  existed,  and  that  was  all," 
he  says.  He  was  too  conscientious  an  artist  that  his  work 
should  be  immediately   remunerative.     No  wonder,  then, 

20 


306      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

that  his  verses  were  sometimes  pessimistic,  though  of  sound 
morale  at  the  core,  and  ahvays  of  polished  workmanship, 
for,  as  his  brother  says,  "  his  literary  conscience  awoke  in 
him  at  the  same  moment  as  his  literary  talent."  "  It  is 
style  that  perfumes  a  book,"  he  wrote,  and  he  would  sit 
for  hours  sifting,  kneading,  and  molding  words  to  fit  his 
fancy. 

His  first  prose  piece.  The  Story  of  Red  Ridinghood  (le 
Roman  du  Chaperon-Rouge),  was  characteristic  of  his 
whole  work  before  the  war  of  1870.  It  personifies  the 
happy  insouciance  of  the  artist  temperament  as  a  sprite 
that  leads  children  to  truancy,  and  genius  to  idleness,  and 
yet,  after  being  devoured  at  last  by  the  wolf  of  necessity,  is 
loved  by  those  she  injured,  and  blamed  only  by  the  sage 
Polonius,  for  whom  she  had  no  charm.  Like  the  other 
prose  work  of  this  time.  Red  Ridinghood  is  essentially 
poetic,  and  a  poet  Daudet  remained  to  the  last,  seeing,  as 
Zola  says,  all  things  in  the  half-dream  of  vivid  imaginings 
that  magnifies  all,  and  gives  it  colour  and  intensity,  distil- 
ling from  nature  its  elements  of  pathos,  humour,  and  happi- 
ness. Realist  as  he  came  to  be  in  after  years,  he  never 
chose  to  see  the  sordid  side  of  naturalism,  he  instinctively 
avoided  the  pettiness  that  delighted  the  old  Flaubert  and 
the  young  Huysmans.  The  romantic  fancy  of  these  early 
tales  broods  over  the  later  Parisian  dramas,  and  so  mingles 
emotion  with  exact  description  that  he  makes  a  dainty  fancy 
spring  up,  rare  and  delicate,  out  of  reality  itself. 

Zola  describes  him  during  these  years  as  "  living  on  the 
outskirts  of  the  city  with  other  poets,  a  whole  band  of  joy- 
ous bohemians.     He  had  the  delicate  nervous  beauty  of  an 

ab  horse,  with  flowing  hair,  silky  divided  beard,  large 
eyes,  narrow  nose,  an  amorous  mouth,  and  over  it  all  a 


Alphonse  Daudet  307 

sort  of  illumination,  a  breath  of  tender  light  that  indi- 
vidualised the  whole  face  with  a  smile  full  at  once  of  in- 
tellect and  of  the  joy  of  life.  There  was  something  in  him 
of  the  French  street-urchin,  something  too  of  the  Oriental 
woman."  It  was  then  that  he  made  those  bohemian  ac- 
quaintances, the  rates  of  his  Jack^  and  it  is  simply  mar- 
vellous, as  his  brother  has  remarked,  that  he  could  have 
lived  with  them  without  losing  aught  of  his  talent,  or 
leaving  behind  the  bloom  of  his  youth,  the  freshness  of 
his  mind,  and  the  straightforwardness  of  his  character. 
"He  shared  their  miseries  often;  their  disordered  in- 
stincts never." 

Fortune  was  soon  to  smile  on  him,  however.  There  was 
a  gradually  increasing  demand  for  his  work  in  the  press, 
and  in  1861  the  Empress  Eugenie,  fascinated  by  his  poem 
on  "  The  Plums,"  changed  his  precarious  freedom  to  an 
official  sinecure,  that  this  rare  talent  might  develop  undis- 
turbed by  daily  care.  She  induced  the  Duke  of  Morny, 
the  Emperor's  half-brother  and  minister  of  state,  to  give 
the  poet  a  nominal  secretaryship,  a  post  that  he  held  till 
Morny's  death  in  1865,  and  turned  to  excellent  literary 
account  in  The  Nabab  and  elsewhere. 

Privation  had,  however,  already  undermined  his  health, 
and  to  recover  this  he  was  now  encouraged  by  Government 
to  travel  to  Algeria,  to  Corsica,  Sardinia,  and  the  south  of 
France,  and  thus  not  only  developed  his  always  deficient 
sense  of  colour,  but  collected  the  material  for  the  Arab  and 
Corsican  stories  m  Letters  from  my  J//// and  Monday  Tales ^ 
for  The  Nabab,  for  Numa  Roumesian,  and  for  the  immortal 
Tartaririy  whose  original  was  for  a  time  his  travelling  com- 
panion. It  was  now  that  Daudet  made  the  acquaintance 
of  Mistral,  the  Proven9al  poet,  of  Gambetta,  of  Rochefort, 


308      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

and  of  Th^rion,  from  all  of  whom  he  learned  secrets  of  art 
or  of  character.  From  dingy  bohemianism  he  had  passed, 
he  said,  to  a  butterfly  life.  From  twenty-one  he  knew  only 
happiness  till  shattered  nerves  brought  him  their  melancholy 
reckoning. 

He  now  began  to  attempt  play-writing,  but  with  such 
indifferent  success  that  our  present  purpose  invites  us  to 
pass  in  silence  these  efforts,  continued  through  many  years. 
Still,  on  Morny's  death  in  1865,  Daudet  felt  sufficient  con- 
fidence in  his  talent  to  resign  his  post  and  seek  the  seclu- 
sion of  his  native  Provence,  where  he  wrote  a  first  draft  of 
Little  Thingumy  (le  Petit  Chose),  which  was  not  finished, 
however,  till  the  autumn  of  1867. 

This  is  a  very  fascinating  and  yet  an  unsatisfactory  book. 
The  autobiographical  portion  is  pathetic  and  charming, 
the  rest  is  extravagant  and  fantastically  romantic,  though 
Little  Thingumy  is  so  good-hearted  and  charming  through- 
out that  we  pardon  his  inconsequence  and  his  weakness. 
Daudet  thought  the  book  written  too  soon,  and  wished  he 
had  waited,  remarking  thoughtfully  that  "  something  very 
good  might  have  been  made  of  my  youth." 

It  was  while  writing  this  book  that  his  second  and  great- 
est good  fortune  came  to  him,  —  his  marriage  with  an  almost 
ideal  helpmeet,  herself  a  woman  of  letters  both  by  birth 
and  training,  whose  cool,  Northern  common-sense  supple- 
mented his  Southern  ardour  with  a  harmony  of  soul  that  he 
has  transposed  with  infinite  art  into  a  discord  in  his  Numa 
Roumestan,  It  is  true  that  for  three  years  he  attempted  no 
great  work,  surrendering  himself  to  the  joy  of  his  new  life, 
and  working  up  old  impressions  in  the  Letters  from  my  Mill 
(1869),  now  one  of  his  most  popular  books,  though  it  met 
at  first  with  but  small  success ;  which  is  the  more  strange  as 


Alphonse  Daudet  309 

it  contains  that  nearly  perfect  gem  of  a  story,  The  Elixir  of 
Father  Gaucher,  and  other  work  hardly  inferior  and  most 
characteristic.  But  when  the  Terrible  Year  came  and 
passed  it  found  him  transformed  in  spirit,  fitted  for  serious 
work,  largely,  as  it  seems,  by  this  most  admirable  woman, 
with  her  well-balanced,  healthy  mind,  though  her  own  fic- 
tion. Children  and  Mothers  and  the  Childhood  of  a  Parisian 
Girl,  shows  touches  of  the  morbid  art  of  Marivaux. 

Of  their  collaboration  we  have  four  estimates,  his,  hers, 
their  son  Leon's,  and  that  of  their  closest  friend,  Edmond 
de  Goncourt.  They  talked  over  all  the  situations  and  at 
every  step  she  revised  his  work,  "  scattering  over  it,"  he 
says,  "  a  little  of  her  beautiful  azure  and  gold  powder,"  while 
she  compares  their  joint  work  to  the  decoration  of  a  Jap- 
anese fan  :  "  on  one  side  the  subject,  the  characters,  and  the 
atmosphere  in  which  they  move ;  on  the  other,  sprays  of 
verdure,  petals  of  flowers,  the  slender  prolongation  of  a  little 
branch,  what  remains  of  colour  or  of  gold-leaf  on  the 
painter's  brush." 

With  talent  thus  aided  and  supplemented  Daudet  began 
in  1868  his  Tartarin  of  Tarascon  (1872),  less  a  novel  than 
a  long  satirical  tale,  a  playful  bantering  of  that  mirage  of 
gasconade  and  insincerity  that  affects  the  vision  of  most 
Southern  Frenchmen.  The  caricature  is,  perhaps,  too 
subtle  for  our  taste,  and  indeed  it  took  the  French  public 
some  years  to  realise  that  they  were  the  richer  by  a  master- 
piece of  most  admirable  fooling.  But  once  convinced,  they 
have  remained  faithful,  and  it  is  said  that  the  discovery  of 
Tartarin  and  his  exploitation  On  the  Alps  (1886),  and  at 
Port- Tarascon  (1890),  brought  to  the  author  of  his  being 
^80,000. 

Of  this  profitable  hero  Daudet  says  that  '^judged  freely 


3IO      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

after  many  years  it  seems  to  me  that  Tartarin  has  qualities 
of  youth,  of  vitahty,  of  truth,  a  truth  from  over- Loire,  that 
may  swell  and  exaggerate  facts,  but  never  lies."  As  that 
other  Provencal  Zola,  says,  "  it  is  truth  seen  from  its  hu- 
mourous side."  Daudet  found  vent  here  for  the  ardour  of 
his  Southern  nature,  and  thus  attained  a  more  sustained 
realism  in  the  Parisian  dramas  that  were  to  follow.  No  one 
has  ever  caught,  with  such  delicately  keen  perception  and 
such  sympathy  as  he,  the  effervescent  imagination  of  Pro- 
vence that  creates  its  own  environment  and  yet  charms  in 
spite  of  persistent  self-deception.  He  has  himself  described 
it  in  Nuffia  Roumestan  as  **  pompous,  classical,  theatrical ; 
loving  parade,  costume,  the  platform,  banners,  flags,  trum- 
pets ;  clannish,  traditional,  caressing,  feline,  of  an  eloquence 
brilliant,  excited  yet  colourless,  quick  to  anger,  and  yet  giv- 
ing anger  a  sham  expression  even  when  it  is  sincere." 
Such  was  Numa,  and  such  is  Tartarin,  a  cinemetograph  of 
the  Midi. 

But  between  his  marriage  and  the  war,  and  indeed  till 
1873,  Daudet  was  occupied  chiefly  with  short  stories  that 
were  to  win  him,  even  before  his  first  true  novel  was  written, 
a  place  among  the  best  of  modern  raconteurs,  and  some 
claim  to  be  regarded  as  the  inventor  of  the  newspaper  story 
in  France.  The  Letters  f7-om  my  Mill  is,  perhaps,  Daudet's 
one  book  before  1874  that  the  critic  can  regard  as  of  pri- 
mary import,  for  though  the  prevailing  tone  is  still  roman- 
tic, his  pathos  and  humour  strike  often  more  realistic  notes, 
and  reveal  the  student  of  Balzac.  Nowhere  was  he  to  ren- 
der external  impressions  of  Provengal  Hfe  with  such  delicate 
intimacy  as  here,  where  he  seems  at  times,  as  he  said,  "  hyp- 
notised by  reality,"  whether  it  be  of  medieval  Avignon,  as 
in  The  Pope's  Mule^  of  the  irony  of  village  pettiness,  as  in 


Alphonse  Daudet  3 1 1 

Old  Folks  (les  Vieux),  or  of  pastoral  life  in  The  Stars, 
There  is  a  medieval  verve  in  The  Elixir  and  IVie  Curate  of 
Cucignaii,  there  is  a  fantasy  like  that  of  Hoffmann  in  The 
Man  with  the  Golden  Brain,  the  mirage  of  grotesque  exag- 
geration in  The  Beaucaire  Stage,  and  unsuspected  power  of 
realistic  description  of  nature  in  In  Camargue,  His  gen- 
tlest pathos  is  in  Bixiou's  Poi'tfolio,  his  deepest  in  The  Two 
Inns,  and  there  is  a  hint  at  least  in  Barrack  Homesickness  of 
the  psychological  analysis  that  was  to  dominate  his  last  years. 
Thus  in  these  exquisitely  polished  cameos  of  literary  art 
we  have  the  pledge  of  all  that  he  was  to  accomplish,  not 
only  in  the  Monday  Tales,  the  Letters  to  an  Absentee,  and 
Artists^  Wives,  but  in  the  Tartarin  books  and  the  novels 
also.  It  was  natural  that  his  Southern  imagination  should 
find  its  first  expression  in  these  little  jewels,  for  the  faculty 
of  sustained  application  came  only  with  the  tempering  of 
war;  but  there  is  no  need  to  dwell  on  them  here  save  to 
note  the  gradual  subsidence  of  romanticism,  a  growth  of  the 
Parisian  element,  a  stronger  and  fuller  social  nature,  rarely 
with  a  touch  of  bitterness,  as  in  Arthur  or  The  Bookkeeper, 
more  often  with  the  humour  of  perennial  youth,  and  the 
growth  of  genial  sympathy  with  human  foibles  that  lends  a 
grateful  aroma  to  stories  that  might  easily  be  given  a  pessi- 
mistic turn,  such  as  Little  Stenn,  Belisaire's  Prussian  and 
Mr.  Bonnicar's  Patties.  But  most  of  all  one  is  struck  in 
the  latter  tales  with  the  glowing  patriotism  as  it  appears  in 
the  superb  Game  of  Billiards,  The  Ferry,  the  universally 
known  Siege  of  Berlin  and  The  Last  Class.  It  found  also 
a  much  more  chauvinistic  expression  in  some  now  omitted 
Letters  to  an  Absentee,  and  in  parts  of  a  series  of  sketches 
in  war  time  published  in  1874  as  Robert  Helmont,  in  which 
are  also  preliminary  studies  for  his  Jack  and  The  Nabab, 


312     A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

But  while  these  books  were  slowly  bringing  fame  they  were 
not  bringing  fortune.  That  he  was  to  attain  at  a  stroke  by 
Fromont  Jr.  and  Risler  Sr.y  his  first  "  Parisian  Drama," 
better  known  to  English  readers  under  the  name  of  its  femi- 
nine incarnation  of  evil,  "  Sidonie."  It  would  seem  that 
to  achieve  popular  success  it  was  needful  for  him  to  plant 
the  seed  of  his  genius  in  the  muck-beds  of  Parisian  domes- 
tic infelicities,  but  he  certainly  treated  that  unfortunate  con- 
vention of  literary  taste,  or  perhaps  it  were  juster  to  say  that 
inevitable  nemesis  of  French  marriage  customs,  with  com- 
mendable restraint  here  and  always. 

Throughout  the  "  Parisian  Dramas  "  Daudet  is  a  most 
anxious  student  of  life.  Wherever  he  was  he  was  taking 
mental  notes,  and  often  literal  ones.  Piles  of  such  memo- 
randa are  among  his  literary  remains.  All  his  novels  have 
their  roots  in  things  seen,  in  a  love  of  truth,  from  which  he 
would  at  times  break  away  for  sudden  incursions  into  the 
realms  of  fantasy,  never  without  an  artistic  purpose,  but 
always  with  loss  of  power,  that  he  regained,  like  Antaeus,  on 
touching  earth  again.  So  when  he  plans  to  write  a  serious 
novel  of  Parisian  life  he  chooses  a  scene  that  he  could 
observe  from  his  own  windows  in  the  ancient  Hdtel 
Lamoignon  in  the  Marais.  A  commercial  experience  of 
his  father  furnished  the  mainspring  of  the  action,  "  mutual 
interest  coupling  together  in  unremitting  labour  for  years 
beings  different  in  temperament  and  in  education."  His 
novel  is  the  story  of  an  honest  and  talented  man  whose 
abilities  raise  him  socially  into  a  society  against  whose  cor- 
ruption he  has  no  hereditary  defence,  and  from  which  he 
escapes  only  by  suicide.  Beside  old  Risler,  the  soul  of 
honour,  he  places  the  young  and  base  Fromont,  and  then  he 
bestows  on  the  base  man  a  noble  wife,  and  on  the  good  man 


Alphonse  Daudet  313 

a  base  one  who  shall  be  jealous  of  the  social  position  of 
Mme.  Fromont,  as  she  will  be  at  the  seductiveness  of  the 
other.  These  are  the  four  pillars  of  the  story.  Around 
them  he  grouped  figures  no  less  real  because  drawn,  they 
too,  from  daily  observation.  There  is  the  decayed  actor 
Delobelle,  "blooming  and  sonorous,"  and  his  hunchback 
daughter  D^sir^e,  who  seems  to  have  stepped  from  a  novel 
of  Dickens,  and  there  is  Planus  with  his  sturdy  Alsacian 
honest  loyalty.  But  because  these  figures  are  based  on 
observation,  they  are  portraits  rather  than  characters,  and 
our  interest  is  more  in  plot  than  in  evolution  of  soul.  The 
principal  personages  are  weak,  even  Sidonie,  that  "  mush- 
room of  the  Parisian  gutter,"  who,  because  she  has  been 
humiliated  all  her  childhood  with  the  prospect  before  her  of 
becoming  a  dried  up  mansard-flower  of  vanity  and  envy  at 
last,  finds  in  prosperity  her  only  joy  in  malice  and  in  the 
humiliation  of  others.  The  story  toward  the  last  grows 
somewhat  stagey,  and  the  close  seems  a  regrettable  conces- 
sion to  sentimentality,  such  as  was  to  deface  parts  of  Jack 
and  The  Nababy  before  the  romantic  virus  was  finally  neu- 
tralised, though  it  was  never  expelled.  Still  no  one  can 
read  Frojnont  Jr.  and  Risler  Sr.  to-day  and  wonder  that 
the  reader  of  1873,  nursed  perhaps  on  Feuillet  and  Cher- 
buliez,  should  have  hailed  it  with  delight,  for  as  yet  there 
was  none  in  France  who  could  have  been  regarded  as  a 
rival,  actual  or  prospective,  of  its  author. 

But  Daudet  was  to  do  better  things  than  this.  He  had 
found  himself  conscious  of  a  new  power  and  discovered  the 
joy  of  sustained  creative  eifort.  ^\tn  Jack^  his  next  novel 
(1876),  is  better,  though  the  critic  will  hardly  accord  it  the 
pre-eminent  place  that  it  was  said  to  hold  in  the  mind  of 
its  author.     He  called  it  a  work  of  "  pity,  anger,  and  irony," 


314     A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

and  here  he  unconsciously  lays  his  finger  on  its  weakness. 
It  is  self-concious  and  self- revealing,  and  what  it  reveals  is 
a  hyper-sensitive  softness  and  an  abuse  of  his  pathetic 
power  greater  than  we  shall  find  in  his  work  elsewhere. 
The  central  figure  is  an  illegitimate  child,  by  turns  petted 
and  neglected  by  a  frivolous  'and  whimsical  mother,  and 
forced  at  last  to  struggle  for  existence  in  a  world  for  which 
he  had  been  studiously  unfitted,  to  fall  the  victim  of  his 
virtues  and  of  the  meanness  or  thoughtlessness  of  others. 
This  Jack,  wrecked  by  natural  though  misdirected  affection, 
was  taken  from  life,  and  so,  alas  for  human  nature,  was  his 
mother.  Most  of  the  other  characters  were  taken  from 
Daudet's  associates,  especially  those  of  his  bohemian  years 
in  the  Latin  Quarter ;  and  so  frank  was  the  procedure  that 
he  did  not  always  trouble  himself  to  change  even  the  names 
of  those  failures  in  literature  and  art,  who  formed  a  sort  of 
mutual-admiration  club,  envious  only  of  recognised  talent. 
These  rates  furnish  the  humour  of  the  story,  for  here 
Daudet's  good  nature  is  constantly  getting  the  better  of  his 
contempt.  It  is  not,  however,  the  part  that  is  most  interest- 
ing in  the  evolution  of  the  author's  genius  or  of  the  fiction 
of  our  generation,  for  here  Jack  holds  a  very  significant 
place.  In  bringing  his  hero  into  direct  touch  with  the 
sombre  realities  of  the  foundry  and  the  stoke-hole,  Daudet 
was  the  first  in  France  to  make  an  honest  study  of  the  great 
artisan  class,  —  a  very  different  matter  from  the  study  of 
pathology  in  low  life  in  Germinie  Lacerteux,  There  is  a 
touch  of  Dutch  realism  in  the  wedding-feast  at  Saint-Mande 
and  in  the  lives  of  Dr.  Rivals  and  Belisaire,  the  peddler. 
And  there  is  an  innovation  also  in  its  stylistic  technic,  for 
here,  in  the  description  of  the  marine  engine  at  Indre,  are 
the  first  traces  of  that  personification  of  material  objects 


Alphonse  Daudet  315 

that  he  was  to  apply  so  effectively  in  The  Little  Parish  (la 
Petite  paroisse,  1895),  and  that  has  become  one  of  the  most 
effective  devices  of  his  friendly  rival  Zola.  There  is  some- 
what more  development  of  character  here  than  in  Fromont 
Jr.  and  Risler  Sr.,  but  it  is  not  always  consistent,  and  the 
plot  certainly  does  not  hold  the  reader  and  compel  attention 
to  the  close  as  did  that  of  the  earlier  novel. 

Better  character  drawing  and  better  fabulation  than  in 
either  of  the  preceding  novels  distinguish  The  Nabab^  whose 
characters  in  the  main  are  men  who  were  or  had  been  in 
the  public  eye.  The  central  figure,  Jansoulet,  was  obviously 
Francois  Bravay,  who  had  returned  to  France  from  Egypt 
as  the  Nabab  from  Tunis,  with  wealth  acquired  even  more 
dubiously,  and  by  lavish  use  of  money  had  got  himself  thrice 
elected  to  the  French  parliament  from  the  district  of  Gard, 
as  the  Nabab  did  once  from  Corsica,  only  to  find  his  elec- 
tion thrice  annulled,  as  a  useless  and  inopportune  scandal, 
by  the  votes  of  men  no  whit  better  than  he.  This  had 
happened  in  1864,  and  Bravay  survived  in  poverty  and 
contempt  the  fall  of  the  Empire,  whose  corruption  he  had 
understood  without  realising  its  hypocrisy.  But  this  use 
of  a  discredited  adventurer,  in  whose  fate  he  discerned  one 
of  the  most  cruel  injustices  that  Paris  had  ever  commit- 
ted, was  not  Daudet's  most  daring  blending  of  history  and 
fiction.  The  novel  owes  much  of  adventitious  interest 
and  no  small  part  of  its  artistic  strength  to  the  skill  with 
which  he  turned  to  account  his  years  as  secretary  to  Morny 
in  his  picture  of  Mora,  whom  he  has  surrounded  with  a 
group  of  easily  recognisable  adventurers  from  the  strange 
social  scum  of  the  Second  Empire.  In  the  main  he  has 
been  faithful  to  the  spirit  of  history,  though  not  of  course 
to  its  letter.     In  Mora  mercy  has  seasoned  what  would  be 


3i6      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

justice  to  the  cynical  Morny.  *'  I  have  painted  him,"  said 
Daudet,  "  as  he  loved  to  show  himself,  in  his  Richelieu- 
Brummel  attitude.  ...  I  have  exhibited  the  man  of  the 
world  that  he  was  and  wished  to  be ;  assured  that  were  he 
living  he  would  not  be  displeased  to  be  presented  thus." 
And  as  Mora  was  in  the  very  letters  but  a  thin  disguise  for 
Morny,  so  the  men  of  1877  instantly  recognised  Bois- 
Landry,  Monpavon,  Cardailhac,  Moessard,  Le  Merquier, 
Hemerlingue,  and  even  the  servants  of  the  original  Nabab, 
and  there  were  those  who  said  that  Felicia  Ruys  was  none 
other  than  Sarah  Bernhardt.  Dr.  Jenkins  was  Dr.  Olliffe, 
though  the  arsenic  pills  belonged  to  another,  and  the 
account  of  the  orphanage  of  Bethlehem,  for  which  the 
sympathies  of  the  Nabab  were  so  cynically  engaged,  was 
copied  almost  literally  from  the  report  of  a  real  institution 
founded  by  as  philanthropic  men  with  similar  purpose  and 
like  results. 

In  contrast  to  these  scenes  of  high  life,  of  extravagance, 
frivolity,  and  luxury,  Daudet  introduces  the  family  of  Pere 
Joyeuse,  personifications  of  idyllic  simplicity  of  heart  and 
mind.  But  these  characters  also  had  a  kernel  of  truth,  for 
Daudet  had  met  P^re  Joyeuse  as  a  Communist  in  18  71. 
These  scenes  are  not  without  pathos,  yet  they  injure  the 
book  as  a  work  of  art.  The  grotesque  has  been  success- 
fully mingled  with  the  tragic  by  Shakspere  and  by  Hugo, 
but  sentimental  pathos,  however  skilful,  puts  the  reader  out 
of  touch  with  the  impressive  dignity  of  Mora's  deathbed 
and  funeral,  with  the  broad  fresco-strokes  of  the  Bey's 
Festival,  and  the  stern  satire  of  Jansoulet's  end.  This  was 
an  artistic  device  brought  over  ixom  Jack,  and  Daudet  con- 
tinued to  employ  it  later  as  a  prudent  concession,  so  he 
told  Zola,  to  popular  taste,  but  his  contrasts  grew  less  glaring 


Alphonse  Daudet  317 

as  he  grew  surer  of  his  naturalism.  Yet  perhaps  after  all 
The  Nababf  for  its  humour  and  its  satire,  its  idyl  and  its 
pathos,  its  exuberant  picturesqueness  and  tragic  power,  is 
the  most  characteristic,  if  not  the  best,  of  Daudet's  work 
in  fiction. 

Kings  in  Exile ^  of  1879,  was  a  more  daring  venture,  for 
it  was  of  necessity  less  a  product  of  personal  observation 
than  of  current  rumour  and  constructive  imagination,  such 
as  had  guided  Zola  in  Booty,  Hence  he  found  it,  as  he 
says,  "  that  one  of  my  books  that  gave  me  most  trouble 
to  put  together,  the  one  that  I  carried  longest  in  my  mind, 
after  it  had  appeared  to  me  as  a  title  and  dim  design  one 
evening  on  the  Place  du  Carrousel  through  the  tragic  rent 
in  the  Parisian  sky  made  by  the  ruins  of  the  Tuileries.  It 
should  be  a  drama  of  princes  exiled  to  the  gay  capital  by 
fortune  or  by  choice,  a  book  of  modern  history  from  the 
pulsing  heart  of  Hfe  as  it  is,  not  from  the  dust  of  archives." 
Again  all  the  characters  were  patent  to  every  reader.  The 
King  of  Westphalia  was  George  of  Hannover,  his  daughter 
was  Friederike,  the  Queen  of  Asturia  was  Isabella  of  Spain, 
Christian  was  the  ex-King  of  Naples,  Axel  the  Prince  of 
Orange,  and  Palma  Don  Carlos.  The  minor  characters 
also,  L^vis,  S^phora,  and  others,  were  recognisable ;  the 
elder  Meraut  was  Daudet's  own  father,  and  Elis6e  a  com- 
posite of  the  author  and  an  old  friend.  Many  of  the  inci- 
dents also  had  their  counterparts  in  the  common  gossip  of 
the  time,  though  of  course  all  was  treated  with  the  license 
of  poetic  idealisation. 

Kings  in  Exile  marks  a  decided  advance  in  the  power 
of  developing  character.  He  had  never  yet  shown  such 
clairvoyant  vision  as  in  the  noble  tragedy  of  Queen  Fr^- 
derique,  and  it  is  surely  remarkable  that  a  book  dealing  with 


3i8      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

such  a  subject  as  the  crumbling  of  an  old  regime  should  have 
had  such  sympathetic  charm  as  to  win  the  praise  alike  of 
royalist  and  republican.  Yet  the  book  was  evidently  of  slow 
and  reluctant  production.  We  feel  that  this  is  a  realm  of 
thought  and  interest  foreign  alike  to  the  author  and  to  us. 
The  fabulation  is  perhaps  closer  than  in  The  Nabab  ox  Jack ^ 
but  we  miss  the  broad  sweep  of  picturesque  description 
that  glorified  certain  pages  of  The  Nabab  and  make  chap- 
ters of  Nunia  Roumestan  quiver  beneath  the  Southern  sun. 
But  in  Meraut  and  Fr^d^rique,  in  subtle  psychology  and 
development  of  motive,  where  Daudet  most  needed  to  grow 
and  where  he  was  still  destined  to  make  the  greatest  prog- 
ress, this  novel  shows  a  distinct  advance,  that  was  further 
accentuated  in  Numa  Roumestati  two  years  later  (1881). 

Daudet  regarded  Numa  Roumestan  as  "  the  least  incom- 
plete of  all  his  works."  It  is  a  "  Parisian  drama,"  but  its 
central  figure  is  a  typical  son  of  Provence,  whom  men  have 
persisted  in  identifying  with  Gambetta,  probably  because 
that  statesman  was  as  typical  of  the  country  of  his  nativity 
as  Numa  himself,  in  whom  there  is  also  a  great  deal  of 
Daudet's  self,  though  every  politician  of  the  south  of  France 
might  have  seen  some  of  his  features  reflected  there. 
Most  of  the  other  characters  were,  like  Numa,  "  bundles  of 
diverse  sticks,"  the  only  acknowledged  individual  portrait 
being  that  of  the  tambourinist  Valmajour. 

The  Provence  of  this  novel  contrasts  curiously  with  that 
of  Tartarin  thirteen  years  before.  It  seems  to  have  grown, 
as  Sherard  cleverly  says,  "  naturally  and  morally  dusty." 
Certainly  it  was  not  so  intelligible,  but  possibly  this  was 
because  it  was  more  subtly  profound,  because  he  had  more 
completely  and  successfully  fluxed  the  multitude  of  obser- 
vations  that   crowded  his  note.books  and  his   mind.     In 


Alphonse  Daudet  319 

any  case  the  critic  perceives  immediately  that  we  have  no 
longer  here  a  series  of  episodes  as  in  The  Nabab  and 
Kings  in  Exik,  but  a  closely  articulated  narration,  in  which 
the  central  interest  is  always  the  change  wrought  in  char- 
acter by  the  clash  of  Northern  and  Southern  temperaments. 
From  the  chime  of  his  own  marriage  his  artist  mind  seems 
to  have  evolved  this  story  of  sweet  bells  jangled  out  of  tune. 

Because  of  this  closer  articulation  there  is  less  breadth  in 
narration,  but  there  is  equal  humour  and  closer  analysis  in 
the  tragedy  of  an  effervescent  optimism  bruising  itself 
against  the  realities  of  life.  By  his  facile  promises,  by  his 
light-hearted  thoughtlessness,  Numa  wrecks  all  who  trust  in 
him,  while  he  rises  buoyant  over  the  sea  of  troubles  that  he 
has  caused.  It  is  the  tragic  counterpart  of  the  comedy  of 
Tartarin,  and  in  Henriette  we  are  shown  the  idyllic  side 
of  the  same  temperament,  tragic-comic  in  Valmajour  and 
wholly  comic  in  Bompard,  a  figure  borrowed  from  Tartarin 
for  the  occasion.  Opposed  to  all  these  is  Rosalie,  Numa's 
wife  and  Daudet's,  who  sees  the  world  with  Parisian  clair- 
voyance, but  is  not  the  happier  for  the  vision.  In  its 
closely  knit  structure,  in  its  relentless  irony,  this  book 
marks  the  third  phase  in  Daudet's  development,  from 
romanticism  through  external  realism  to  the  psychic  realism 
of  the  interplay  of  character  and  environment. 

If  there  were  any  doubt  that  this  cardinal  place  belongs 
to  Numa  Roumestan^  The  Evangelist  (1883)  would  remove 
it,  for  here  the  closer  structure  and  the  psychic  preoccupa- 
tion leap  to  the  eye.  The  general  title  is  now  changed. 
This  is  no  longer  a  "  Parisian  drama,"  it  is  an  "  observa- 
tion ;  "  that  is,  it  purports  to  be  a  psychic  study,  not  a  novel 
of  action,  though  indeed  the  story  pulses  with  vigorous  move- 
ment, and  seems  written,  as  we  know  that  it  was  written, 


320      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

under  the  pressure  of  indignation  and  moral  revolt,  realising 
to  a  wonderful  degree  the  rare  combination  of  "  intensity  of 
feeling  and  a  sage  simplicity  of  execution."  Its  pathetic 
heroine  was  a  teacher  of  Daudet's  son  L^on,  and  in  a 
letter  to  the  London  Times,  published  just  after  the  appear- 
ance of  the  novel  (February,  1883),  we  shall  find  that  his 
Eline  was  not  the  only  victim  of  the  lust  for  spiritual  domi- 
nation deliberately  exploiting  the  morbid  pathology  of 
religious  enthusiasm.  Never  has  Daudet  been  so  pessimis- 
tic as  here.  No  form  of  Christian  idealism  escapes  his 
satire.  The  love  of  God  becomes  in  Madame  Autheman 
the  cloak  of  a  domineering  ambition,  in  Mile,  de  Beuil  it 
masks  a  morose  joy  in  cruelty,  in  Eline  it  demands  a 
deliberate  sacrifice  of  human  affections  for  a  morbid  ideal, 
in  Henriette  it  involves  a  sapping  of  character.  Force 
rules  in  this  spiritual  world  as  relentlessly  as  in  the  material 
one.  Weak  and  simple  natures  yield  or  are  crushed.  All 
who  have  won  sympathy  end  by  claiming  pity.  There  is  no 
novel  of  our  day  in  France  where  cant  and  hypocrisy  have 
been  so  cauterised. 

Sapho,  which  followed  The  Evangelist  in  1884,  is  the  last 
novel  that  Daudet  wrote  before  disease  laid  its  racking 
hand  on  him  and  caused  some  natural  flagging  in  his  in- 
tellectual powers.  Edmond  de  Goncourt  regarded  it  as  the 
author's  "  most  complete,  most  human  and  beautiful  story," 
and  most  French  critics  agree  with  him  that  it  is  at  least 
the  work  of  greatest  power  and  that  most  likely  to  survive. 
It  certainly  has  had  the  largest  sale,  but,  though  it  is  writ- 
ten with  great  and  sustained  strength  and  a  realism  that  is 
often  almost  pathologic,  it  is  not  agreeable  reading.  Sapho 
is  the  femme  coUante  (Anglo-Saxons  will  not  need  the 
word  while  they  can  avoid  the  social  abuse  that  it  repre- 


Alphonse  Daudet  321 

sents),  who  clings  with  the  desperation  of  a  last  love  to  the 
rather  weak-willed  Gaussin.  She  loves  him  after  her  kind, 
in  an  animal  way,  and  he  is  tortured  in  spirit  by  jealousy  of 
her  more  than  dubious  past,  by  the  fascination  of  her 
presence,  and  by  the  impending  wreck  of  his  fortunes  and 
his  career.  "  To  his  sons  when  they  are  twenty,"  Daudet 
commends  this  story  of  facile  love  that  saps  the  forces 
of  heart  and  mind.  His  passion  past,  Gaussin  tolerates 
Fanny  Legrand,  then  clings  to  her,  then  shrinks  from  her, 
repudiates  her,  marries  another,  yet  only  to  find  old  custom 
stronger  than  new  duty.  But  when  he  returns  to  her  after 
this  supreme  sacrifice  the  ghastly  truth  is  at  last  forced  on 
him  that  for  such  as  she  there  is  no  moral  obligation  but 
the  pursuit  of  a  whimsical  fancy,  capable  only  of  social  dis- 
integration and  evil.  Critics  call  this  narrative  "eternally 
true."  For  the  sake  of  French  manhood  one  hopes  it  is 
not.  In  any  case  Daudet  has  treated  his  subject  with  the 
relentless  seriousness  of  a  demonstrator  and  has  relieved 
his  satirical  analysis  with  no  touches  of  hghter  humour, 
such  as  sparkled  the  next  year  in  Tartarin  on  the  Alps 
(1885). 

Of  the  novels  of  Daudet's  decadence  from  Tlie  Acade- 
mician (I'lmmortel,  1888)  to  the  posthumous  Head  of  the 
Family  (Soutien  de  famille,  1898),  we  are  content  to  speak 
more  briefly.  The  former  is  primarily  a  satire  on  the 
French  Academy  and  on  myopic  scholarship,  obviously 
forced  but  with  a  lightness  of  humour  and  occasional  pieces 
of  epic  breadth  in  narration  that  dispose  the  reader  to  con- 
done an  action  as  inexplicable  as  it  is  cruel,  and  a  satirical 
imputation  as  improbable  as  it  is  unjust.  Rose  and  Ninette 
(1891)  invites  attention  to  the  eifects  of  divorce,  especially 
on  parents  and  children,  and  The  Little  Parish  (la  Petite 


322      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

paroisse,  1895)  is  a  study  of  various  phases  of  jealousy,  in 
which  Daudet  adopts  the  symbolic  method  of  Zola  and 
Ibsen,  making  the  rhythmic  recurrence  of  the  parish  church 
mark  each  stage  of  an  action  over  which  it  seems  to  pre- 
side, and,  what  is  perhaps  more  significant,  paying  his 
tribute  to  the  evangelical  ethics  of  Tolstoi,  before  which  the 
stern,  pessimistic  retribution  of  the  older  naturalists  degene- 
rates into  sentimental  pity  and  pardon,  marking  thus  the 
anemia  of  the  will  that  is  a  characteristic  note  of  the 
present  waning  of  naturalism,  and  so  seriously  marring  the 
psychology  of  the  story. 

This  was  the  last  novel  published  during  Daudet's  life. 
Since  1885  he  had  been  an  intense  nervous  sufferer  and  a 
victim  of  an  insomnia  that  yielded  only  to  chloral  and  mor- 
phine, so  that  he  often  passed  months  without  touching  a 
pen,  with  alternating  periods  of  mental  activity  and  dead 
calm,  the  latter  increasing  in  length  till  death  brought  sudden 
relief  at  last.  This  fact  will  explain  the  comparatively  in- 
significant production  of  these  later  years.  He  left,  how- 
ever, two  posthumous  volumes.  La  Fedor  and  other  stories, 
which,  when  they  are  not  trivial  are  saturnine,  and  The 
Head  of  the  Family  (Soutien  de  famille),  decidedly  his 
best  story  since  The  Evangelist.  It  is  in  part,  not  the  best 
part,  the  story  of  a  modern  Hamlet,  whose  mind  is  lamed 
by  responsibilities  greater  than  he  feels  himself  able  to 
bear,  and  lamed  also  by  the  acquiescence  of  mother  and 
brother  in  his  assumed  superiority.  In  part,  and  the  best 
part,  the  book  is  a  bitterly  sarcastic  picture  of  French  polit- 
ical hfe,  in  which  characters  are  taken  frankly  from  reality, 
even  to  the  President  of  the  Republic,  in  whom  he  sees  the 
final  flowering  of  the  modern  political  temperament,  an 
unctuous  sentimentality  and  false  fellowship,  masking  heart- 


Alphonse  Daudet  323 

less  and  unscrupulous  ambition.  This  study  of  "  contem- 
porary manners  "  bears  no  marks  of  incompleteness  or  of 
failing  strength.  It  is  Daudet's  literary  testament,  a  Par- 
thian shaft  at  political  hypocrisy,  sent  true  and  strong  from 
the  grave. 

Daudet  was  a  literary  artist  by  instinct  rather  than  by 
reflection.  A  beautiful  talent,  a  little  superficial  in  its 
subtlety,  without  the  forceful  virility  of  Balzac  or  Flaubert 
or  Zola.  He  charms,  not  by  ordered  masses,  but  by  his 
variety  and  suppleness.  Even  in  the  novels  there  is  a  con- 
stant shifting  of  scene,  and  the  single  volume  of  Letters 
from  my  Mill,  regarded  from  this  point  of  view,  shows  an 
astonishing  variety  of  legend  and  revery,  of  symbolism  and 
farce,  of  sentiment  and  dramatic  intensity.  His  work  pro-  > 
ceeds  less  from  thought  than  from  impressions  that  he  re- 
ceived with  a  definiteness  and  guarded  with  a  permanence' 
that  are  ahke  remarkable.  Hence  he  succeeds  best  with 
superficial  natures,  and  where  the  character  cannot  be  per- 
ceived but  must  be  thought  out  in  its  complexity,  he  will 
exhibit  but  a  single  side  of  it.  His  Nabab  could  never 
make  a  fortune,  his  Mora  could  never  govern  an  empire, 
nor  his  Numa  a  republic.  We  are  more  satisfied  with  Tar- 
tarin,  Risler,  M^raut  than  with  these,  and  in  general  more 
content  with  the  women  than  with  the  men.  The  mascu- 
line Mme.  Autheman  may  elude  him,  but  Sidonie  and 
Fanny,  D^sir^e  and  Aline  and  many  another,  even  to  the 
posthumous  F^dor,  are  not  likely  to  slip  from  the  memory. 
Perhaps  it  is  not  unjust  to  say  of  him,  with  Doumic,  that 
he  lacked  wide  experience,  deep  insight  or  keen  interpre- 
tation of  life,  but  yet  made  the  best  possible  use  of  an 
acute  sensitiveness,  of  a  nervous  temperament  and  delicate 
imagination,  as  well  as  of  a  very  beautiful  artistic  nature, 


324      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

and  so  gave  of  the  society  in  which  he  lived  the  broad- 
est, most  varied,  and  most  faithful  image,  while  he  left  be- 
hind him  the  fragrant  memory  of  a  noble  and  sympathetic 
character. 

The  young  Daudet  possessed  by  nature  grace,  charm, 
and  pathos,  qualities  natural  to  that  sunny  South  around 
which  his  humour  plays  so  kindly  in  Tartarin,  so  sternly  in 
Numa.  The  war  added  seriousness  to  these  qualities  and 
turned  playful  wit  to  bitter  satire.  But  he  brought  to  this 
naturalistic  temper  the  mind  of  an  idyllic  poet,  so  that,  as 
Zola  says,  "  his  mind  gallops  in  the  midst  of  the  real,  and 
now  and  again  makes  sudden  leaps  into  the  realm  of  fancy, 
for  nature  put  him  in  that  border  land  where  poetry  ends 
and  reality  begins."  On  this  poet's  vision  in  Daudet  it  is 
well  to  insist,  for  it  gives  his  work  the  appearance  of  a 
kindly  optimism.  Even  in  evil  he  prefers  to  see  the 
ridiculous  than  the  base,  and  hence  it  is  that  his  profoundly 
earnest  satire  still  retains  much  of  the  irony  that  charac- 
terised his  gentler  moods.  This  irony  is  one  of  the  most 
evanescent  of  literary  forms,  it  is  hard  to  define  it  or  its 
charm,  but  it  is  clear  that  it  leads  Daudet  to  greater  sub- 
jectivity, to  more  expression  of  personal  sympathy  for  his 
characters  than  strict  naturalism  admits. 

Daudet's  style  is  that  of  an  impressionist.  In  his  earliest 
work  there  is  conscientious  elaboration  in  structure  and 
phraseology ;  later,  and  in  longer  works,  his  care  is  rather 
for  the  single  episode  than  for  the  whole,  and  he  allows 
himself  liberties  in  syntax  and  vocabulary  if  by  these  arti- 
fices he  can  fix  a  passing  shade  of  thought.  His  work,  at 
least  up  to  'TJie  Academician^  shows  increasing  hmpidity 
and  firmness  in  diction,  and  wise  restraint  in  the  use  of  the 
sources  of  emotion.     While  refusing  "  to  consume  himself 


Alphonse  Daudet  325 

sterilely  for  years  over  one  work,"  like  Flaubert,  lest  by 
elaboration  he  should  lose  sympathy  with  his  theme  and  a 
straightforward  natural  diction,  yet  he  was  never  hasty,  but 
wrote  every  manuscript  thrice  over,  and  would  have  written 
it  as  many  more  had  he  been  able.  Thus  he  attained,  at 
Ohis  best,  a  style  that  is  at  once  classic  and  modern,  artistic 
^  without  artificiality.  His  slight,  rapid,  subtle,  lively,  sug- 
gestive phrases  form  a  curious  contrast  to  the  methodical 
up-piling  of  details  that  marks  the  vast  architecture  of 
Zola's  fiction.  He  is  more  spontaneous,  delicate,  personal, 
idyllic ;  Zola  is  a  more  conscious  objective  artist,  and  so 
more  epic.  Both  have  a  vein  of  romanticism,  but  in 
Daudet  the  idealisation  is  toward  good,  in  Zola  toward  evil. 
Both  have  a  noble  earnestness,  but  Zola's  indignation  has 
more  tonic  virility,  Daudet's  a  more  persuasive  warmth, 
making  him,  as  even  captious  critics  admit,  the  most  lov- 
able writer  of  his  generation. 


CHAPTER  XV 

THE   GENERATION  OF   LOUIS   PHILIPPE 

THE  rise  and  culmination  of  the  romantic  movement 
from  1 82 1  to  1830  had  been  peculiarly  favoura- 
ble to  the  birth  of  literary  talent.  That  of  the  bourgeois 
monarchy  was  much  less  so,  counting  no  names  of  the 
first  rank  save  Daudet  and  Zola.  The  romantic  move- 
ment was  gradually  spending  its  force  during  the  thirties, 
and  the  novelists  born  during  that  time,  with  the  sole 
exception  of  Fabre,  belong  to  the  class  of  mildly  romantic 
story-tellers,  such  as  Malot  and  Theuriet,  or  of  idyllists  like 
Glouvet  or  sensationalists  like  Gaboriau.  This  class  is 
always  with  us  and  appears  also  in  the  early  forties  with 
Claretie  and  Gr^ville,  to  be  continued  and  indeed  to  reach 
its  typical  expression  in  Ohnet,  born  at  the  very  close  of 
our  period.  Meantime,  however,  with  1840  the  new  gen- 
eration who  were  to  take  up  the  work  of  Flaubert  and  the 
Goncourts  come  on  the  stage  and  forerunners  of  the 
psychologist  school  begin  to  appear,  as  well  as  some  repre- 
sentatives of  Renanism  in  fiction.  We  shall  do  weU  to 
consider  first  the  belated  offsprings  of  romanticism,  and  then 
to  turn  to  the  heralds  of  change. 

Among  mere  story-tellers  a  high  place  belongs  to  Hector 
Malot,  whose  first  novel.  Victims  of  Love  (Victimes 
d'amour,  1864)  promised  more  strength  than  his  rapid 
production  has   since   realised,   though   his  No  Relatiom 


The  Generation  of  Louis  Philippe    327 

(Sans  famille,  1878)  has  had  sufficient  force  and  pathos, 
joined  to  a  delicate  grace  of  description,  to  carry  this  story 
of  R^mi,  the  foundling  and  juvenile  Gil  Bias,  into  nearly 
every  language  of  Europe.  Malot's  central  characteristics 
are  his  serious  probity,  his  opposition  to  a  false  religiosity, 
and  a  sympathy  with  vague  humanitarian  ideals,  all  of  which 
endear  him  to  the  middle  class.  He  is  rude  and  severe  at 
times,  but  he  is  always  clean  and  resolutely  optimistic. 
Typical  of  his  sixty-five  volumes  are  Romain  Kalbris 
(1869),  Baccara  (1886),  Conscience  (1888),  and  Justice 
(1889). 

Take  the  characters  of  Feuillet  without  their  tragic  in- 
tensity and  treat  them  with  a  frivolity  akin  to  their  own 
and  the  result  will  be  the  novels  of  Gustav  Droz,  who  in 
his  Papa,  Mama,  and  the  Baby  (Monsieur,  Madame,  et  B^b^, 
1866)  has  caught  the  tone  of  society  in  the  Second  Em- 
pire —  that  society  which,  as  Zola  says,  played  with  amiable 
vices,  as  the  eighteenth  century  did  with  pastoral  life  — 
perhaps  better  than  any  other.  His  best  work  is  Around 
a  Spring  (Autour  d'une  source,  1869),  but  here,  as  always, 
his  psychology  is  weak  and  his  gay  irony  is  stronger  than 
his  daintily  artificial  sentiment. 

Closely  allied  to  Droz,  at  least  in  his  fiction,  is  Ludovic 
Hal^vy,  of  whom  the  universally  read  Abbk  Constantin 
(1882)  is  less  characteristic  than  the  three  volumes  in 
which  he  pursues  the  fortunes  of  the  Cardinal  family 
(Monsieur  et  Madame  Cardinal,  1873,  ^^s  Petites  Cardi- 
nal, 1880,  la  Famille  Cardinal,  1883),  whose  head,  that 
"  corrupt  puritan  Prudhomme  of  vice,"  is  the  incarnation  of 
the  dry  rot  that  Sedan  revealed.  In  the  early  part  of 
Criquette  (1883),  the  story  of  a  fair,  bright,  and  impulsive 
gamine  of  Belleville,  there  is  an  admirable  picture  of  life 


328      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

behind  the  scenes  in  a  small  theatre,  but  the  close  of  the 
novel  is  commonplace  and  unworthy  of  the  beginning, 
and  the  rest  of  Halevy's  fiction  does  not  rise  above 
mediocrity. 

The  years  of  the  apogee  of  the  romantic  drama,  1830- 
1836,  saw  also  the  birth  of  two  men  who  infused  its 
spirit  into  the  romantic  novel  long  after  it  had  ceased  to 
haunt  the  stage.  Richebourg,  who  was  born  in  1833  and 
died  early  in  1898,  has  probably  had  more  readers  than 
any  other  novelist  of  France.  He  was  for  years  the 
favourite  feuilletonist  of  the  penny  papers,  furnishing  by  the 
yard  fiction  of  manifold  mediocrity,  from  the  sensationalism 
of  Ponson  du  Terrail  to  the  sentimentally  pathetic  narrative 
whose  argument,  though  it  run  through  four  volumes,  may 
be  infallibly  summed  up  in  the  lines, — 

"  Marion  pleure,  Marion  crie, 
Marion  veut  qu'on  la  marie." 

Against  this  perpetual  "  weeping  of  Margery "  a  stand 
was  made  for  a  time  by  Emile  Gaboriau  (i 835-1 874), 
whose  novels  of  crime  and  its  detection  have  given  him 
a  European  reputation  as  the  reviver,  if  not  the  inaugurator, 
of  a  widely  popular  though  inferior  genre.  He  has  no 
knowledge  of  character,  no  grace  of  style,  and  there  is 
spinning  of  "  copy  "  even  in  the  best  of  his  novels,  The 
Widow  Lerouge  (1' Affaire  Lerouge,  1866)  or  File  113 
(Dossier  113,  1867)  ;  but  his  popularity  is  perennial,  and 
even  the  best  of  his  imitators,  such  as  Boisgobey,  have 
quite  failed  to  catch  his  secret. 

Meantime  a  new  note,  pleasing  and  prolonged  though 
never  strong,  had  been  struck  by  Andre  Theuriet,  who  sings 
the   provincial  idyl,  usually  of  the   middle  class,   with   a 


The  Generation  of  Louis  Philippe    329 

smiling  melancholy  and  dainty  naturalism,  never  intense, 
but  always  amiable,  amusing,  clean,  and  sweet,  with  much 
facile  sentiment  and  an  occasional  tragic  note.  Born  at 
Marly  (1833)  he  passed  the  first  thirty- two  years  of  his 
life  in  the  country.  His  voluminous  work  in  fiction  dates 
from  middle  life  and  1870.  Here  he  holds  a  place  quite 
apart,  on  the  frontier  of  realism  and  idealism.  All  that  is 
graceful,  gentle,  childlike  in  country  life  he  reproduces 
admirably,  but  he  ignores  the  commonplace  and  shrinks  from 
crass  realities  and  ugliness.  Love  is  his  constant  theme, 
the  sensuous  instinct  rather  than  the  tender  and  artificial 
passion.  It  is  only  gradually  that  he  has  brought  city  and 
country  into  effective  contrast,  as  first  in  Gerard's  Mar- 
riage (1875),  ^^^^  t)est  in  Autumn  Love  (1888)  ;  and  thus 
by  giving  humour  a  place  beside  poetry  he  has  avoided 
monotony  in  his  sixty  volumes  to  a  degree  that  could  hardly 
have  been  hoped. 

Throughout,  Theuriet  shows  an  emotional  temperament. 
His  heroes  are  phases  of  himself,  his  heroines  results  of  his 
experience.  Hence  they  have  psychic  reaUty,  though  with 
no  minute  dissection  or  motive,  just  as  there  is  no-  accurate 
description  of  environment.  Throughout  he  writes  as  much 
for  the  ear  as  for  the  eye,  in  a  singularly  harmonious  style 
that  recalls  at  times  Bernardin  and  even  Rousseau,  though 
taken  as  a  whole  his  work  most  nearly  resembles  the  third 
manner  of  George  Sand. 

Those  rustic  novels  of  the  Scheherazade  of  Nohant.  were 
also  the  inspiration  of  Jules  de  Glouvet,  and  Paul  Ar^ne, 
who  do  for  Maine  and  Provence  what  she  did  for  Berry, 
Theuriet  for  Lorraine,  Balzac  for  Touraine,  Maupassant  for 
Normandy,  and  Fabre  for  the  C^vennes.  There  is  no  rea- 
son to  dwell  on  either  save  to  note  that  their  books  show  a 


330      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

growing  interest  among  the  reading  public  in  picturesque 
moral  geography,  and  that  to  an  increasing  number  of 
novelists  Paris  is  no  longer  France. 

With  Theuriet  one  may  associate  the  facile  raconteur 
Claretie,  whose  best  novel,  The  Assassin,  dates  from  1866, 
while  his  more  recent  work  has  fallen  to  a  dreary  monotony 
of  mediocrity.  On  the  borderland  of  oblivion  stand  also 
the  swarming  multitude  of  volumes  by  Henri  Gr^ville, 
(Mme.  Durand),  whose  sentimental  sensationalism  has  met 
with  much  popular  success,  especially  in  her  novels  of 
Russian  life,  as  for  instance  Dosia  (1876).  Nor  can 
a  materially  higher  rank  be  accorded  to  the  fiction  of 
Theodore  Bentzon  (Madame  Blanc),  whose  interest  in 
America  has  evoked  perhaps  an  undue  interest  in  her 
books  among  us. 

A  much  greater  art  with  the  same  mild  geniality  charac- 
terises the  fiction  of  Frangois  Copp^e,  who  is  most  felicitous 
in  the  half-tones  of  prose  and  knows  how  to  be  magnani- 
mous with  a  delightfully  naive  suavity.  He  is  at  his  best 
in  short  stories  of  the  lower  middle  class  and  of  humble 
Parisian  life,  as  when  in  Henriette  (1889)  he  tells  the  story 
of  the  wreck  of  a  simple  heart  on  the  rocks  of  social  con- 
vention, or  the  pathetic  suicide  of  the  Daughter  of  Sorrow 
(Fille  de  tristesse),  the  artist's  model,  whose  social  fall  had 
not  quenched  the  pure  flame  of  her  love.  Occasionally 
the  pathetic  sinks  to  the  morbidly  sentimental ;  more  often 
it  rises  to  pessimism  or  irony.  He  is  excellent  in  such 
sketches  as  Maman  Nunu  or  The  Substitute  (le  Rempla- 
^ant)  or  in  such  impressionist  descriptions  as  The  Silver 
Thimble  (le  D^  d'argent)  or  Sunset  (le  Coucher  de  soleil) 
or  The  Medal,  He  has  himself  well  described  his  outlook 
on  life  as  that  of  "  a  man  of  refinement  who  enjoys  simple 


The  Generation  of  Louis  Philippe    331 

people,  an  aristocrat  who  loves  the  masses,"  and  so  has 
given  a  sympathetic  and  somewhat  idealised  expression  of 
democratic  realism. 

In  1848,  just  at  the  close  of  the  period  we  are  consider- 
ing, there  was  born  a  novelist  whose  chief  interest  to  the 
critic  is  not  in  his  novels,  but  in  their  phenomenal  popular- 
ity. The  Iron  Founder  (le  Maitre  des  forges,  1882)  has 
sold  in  France  more  than  a  third  of  a  million  copies,  and  in 
its  translations  as  many  more.  Several  other  novels  by  the 
same  author,  though  they  lag  behind  this,  surpass  all  but  the 
most  successful  efforts  of  the  greatest  masters  of  French 
fiction.  Yet  it  is  obvious  that,  for  men  who  think,  George 
Ohnet  has  no  claim  to  be  regarded  as  a  thinker,  an  analyst, 
an  artist,  or  even  as  a  good  story-teller,  and  for  such  read- 
ers the  royal  acid  of  Lemaitre's  wit  long  ago  dissolved 
whatever  tinsel  glamour  might  have  come  from  a  commercial 
success,  which  shows  at  least  that  the  great  public  knows 
what  it  wants,  in  France  as  with  us,  and  does  not  wait  to 
be  instructed  nor  suffer  itself  to  be  guided  even  by  a  una- 
nimity of  criticism.  He  was  created,  as  Lemaitre  says,  "  for 
the  ilUterate  who  aspire  to  literature."  They  understand 
him,  as  they  do  not  understand  in  their  higher  purposes 
and  art,  either  Daudet  or  Zola,  who  are  not  read  by  the 
multitude  for  the  qualities  that  the  critics  admire,  but  often 
for  those  which  they  deplore,  while  the  more  delicate  art- 
ists of  fiction  are  not  read  by  the  multitude  at  all. 

Ohnet's  method  is  simple,  so  simple  that  any  description 
of  it  will  seem  a  reflection  of  Lemaitre's  masterly  essay. 
He  takes  a  situation  consecrated  by  the  approval  of  gener- 
ations. He  leads  bourgeois  virtue  to  a  facile  triumph,  and 
lets  aristocratic  barriers  sink  before  the  master  of  modern 
commerce  or  industry.     His  heroes  are  all  self-made  men, 


332      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

and  proud  of  their  maker.  His  aristocracy  is  worm-eaten, 
but  still  worthy  of  the  respect  and  ambition  of  snobs  who 
are  careful  to  acquire  millions  before  advertising  their  con- 
tempt for  sordid  wealth  in  eloquent  apostrophes  that  never 
materialise  otherwise  than  in  the  purchase  of  aristocratic 
connections. 

Those  who  read  without  thought  desire  a  conventional 
story  and  conventional  characters.  Ohnet's  characters, 
therefore,  are  not  characters  but  puppets,  and  his  denoue- 
ments are  of  a  monotonous  optimism.  We  have  the  proud, 
virtuous,  unselfish  man,  usually  an  engineer,  always  a  roman- 
tic hero,  a  sort  of  "  archangel  of  democracy."  Then  there 
is  the  heroine,  also  a  straw  figure,  noble  of  course,  proud, 
haughty,  "  incomparably  beautiful,"  who  begins  by  hating 
and  ends  by  marrying  the  wealthy  and  heroic  snob.  Then 
of  course  there  is  the  idle  gentleman,  seductive  and  imper- 
tinent, and  the  rich  bourgeoise  of  amiable  vulgarity,  and  by 
way  of  spice  there  is  the  dime-novel  heroine,  the  gipsy- 
countess  Sarah.  The  minor  characters  are  equally  con- 
ventional, and  so  is  the  society  in  which  they  move.  There 
is  no  trace  of  psychological  continuity  in  their  outbursts  of 
passion  or  magnanimity. 

Given  this  vulgarity  of  situation,  of  character,  and  of 
style,  it  may  be  admitted  that  Ohnet  manages  his  materials 
with  a  good  deal  of  melodramatic  skill  and  with  an  appear- 
ance of  Hterary  quality  that  might  well  have  deceived  those 
who  were  seeking  to  raise  themselves  above  the  level  of 
Richebourg.  Of  these  there  are  many,  and  to  supply  their 
wants  is  a  legitimate  commercial  enterprise  in  which  Ohnet 
has  achieved  a  flattering  success.  His  work  has  been  the 
pastime  of  millions,  but  it  has  contributed  nothing  to  fiction 
as  a  mode  of  thought  or  of  artistic  expression. 


The  Generation  of  Louis  Philippe    333 

This  last  was  the  chief  care  of  Flaubert  and  the  Gon- 
courts,  with  whom  in  aim,  though  by  no  means  in  method 
or  result,  one  might  class  Cladel,  whose  fiction  begins  with 
picturesque  sketches  of  life  in  Quercy,  but  who  in  his  later 
work  made  himself  an  eccentric  pupil  of  the  eccentric  Bau- 
delaire, endeavouring  to  impose  on  prose  fetters  as  galling 
as  those  that  had  maimed  the  classic  alexandrine  verse,  so 
that  his  best  novel.  My  Countrymen  (Mes  paysans,  1869- 
1872),  has  been  described  as  "a  literary  jewel,  curiously 
wrought,  that  one  examines  with  more  surprise  than 
interest." 

Somewhat  similar  is  the  case  of  Armand  Silvestre,  in  so 
far  as  that  poetic  genius  has  not  sold  itself  to  scatology  and 
pornography.  And  with  him  it  is  natural  to  associate 
Catulle  Mendes,  whose  frivolous  stories  have  a  curious  arti- 
fice of  style  that  gives  them,  as  some  critic  has  said,  the 
charm  of  lace,  frail,  light,  yet  exquisite  in  its  delicate  pueril- 
ity. There  are  moments  when  he  suggests  Gautier  both  in 
his  feeling  for  art  and  in  his  complete  lack  of  any  percep- 
tion of  its  relation  to  morals,  passing  lightly  from  such 
toying  trifles  as  The  Nightcap  (le  Bonnet  de  la  marine)  to 
what  might  be  the  deepest  pathos,  as  Old  Bias  (le  Vieux 
Bias,  1882),  or  the  bitterest  satire,  as  The  Child- Woman 
(la  Femme-enfant,  1891),  treating  all  with  equal  care  and 
equal  ethical  indifference. 

Among  artists,  rather  than  story-tellers,  one  may  class 
the  mobile  poet,  Richepin,  who  began  his  work  in  fiction 
with  Strange  Deaths  (les  Morts  bizarres,  1876),  fantastic  tales 
in  the  manner  of  Poe,  and  followed  these,  while  still  in  the 
fervour  of  young  romanticism,  with  Madame  Andr/  (1878). 
Then  in  the  gipsy  story  Miarka  (1883)  he  showed  some- 
what of  the  naturalistic  influence,  as  later  on,  for  instance 


334      ^  Century  of  French  Fiction 

in  The  Beloved  (I'Aim^,  1893),  he  suggests  the  psychologi- 
cal school.  But  throughout  he  is  drawn  naturally  to  ex- 
treme, bizarre  situations,  preferring  the  strange  in  sentiment 
and  the  euphuistic  in  style,  seductive  but  irritating  in  its 
would-be  subtlety,  most  pleasing,  perhaps,  when  the  artist 
in  him  renders  for  us  the  mute  poetry  of  landscape  or  the 
picturesque  gipsy  bands  of  Miarka, 

With  these  artists  of  fiction  Anatole  France  might  claim 
the  highest  place,  were  it  not  that  he  seems  even  more  bent 
on  his  philosophy  than  on  his  art,  having  in  him,  as  Ler 
maitre  observes,  something  of  Racine,  of  Voltaire,  of  Flau- 
bert, of  Renan,  yet  always  himself,  the  perfection  of  grace, 
the  ultimate  flowering  of  the  Latin  genius.  This  son  of  a 
Jewish  bookseller  spent  his  childhood  in  suburban  rambling 
and  among  the  bookstalls  on  the  Paris  quais,  and  was  asso- 
ciated at  school  with  Copp^e  and  Bourget  in  admiration  for 
Aurevilly.  The  literary  result,  in  fiction  as  in  poetry  and 
criticism,  is  a  curious  combination  of  folklore,  hagiology, 
and  paganism,  of  spiritism,  mysticism,  and  materialism,  of 
hedonism  and  kindliness,  domesticity  and  pyrrhonism.  He 
is  a  satirist  and  a  fantasist.  His  fiction  is  only  a  mode  of 
expressing  his  doubts  or  his  ideas.  The  sole  exception  to 
this  is  The  Red  Lily  (le  Lys  rouge,  1894),  an  imitation  of 
Bourget  and  his  worst  and  least  characteristic  production,  if 
we  except  the  youthful  Jocasia  and  the  Gaunt  Cat  ( Jocaste 
et  le  chat  maigre,  1879),  which,  in  spite  of  outcroppings  of 
irony  and  humour,  is  feeble,  incomplete,  and  sensational. 
But  already  his  second  novel.  The  Crime  ofSylvestre  Bonnard 
(1881),  showed  a  most  gentle  and  large-hearted  irony  in 
its  story  of  the  rescue  of  a  young  girl  from  abusive  guardian- 
ship and  the  hypocrisy  of  "  prunes  and  prisms  " ;  and  the 


The  Generation  of  Louis  Philippe    335 

same  graceful  irony  and  sympathy  with  childhood  pervades 
with  its  dainty  morahsing  The  Book  of  Fiiefidship  (le  Livre 
de  mon  ami,  1885),  recollections  of  the  author's  own 
youth. 

In  Balthasar  (1890)  one  notes  a  growing  tendency  to 
the  medieval  and  to  mysticism,  that  finds  its  most  striking 
expression  in  the  prayer  of  the  soulless  and  immortal 
Lilith,  who  desires  "  death  that  I  may  enjoy  life,  remorse 
that  I  may  taste  pleasure,"  and  this  preoccupation  with  med- 
ieval Christian  thought  finds  further  expression  in  Thais 
(1890),  the  story  of  a  hermit  of  the  Thebaid,  an  epicurean 
philosopher,  and  an  Alexandrian  courtesan,  a  sceptical  dis- 
play of  Christian  scenery,  or  as  it  were,  a  page  of  the 
Golden  Legend  topsy-turvy,  "piety  of  imagination  with 
impiety  of  thought,"  a  piece  of  Parisian  platonism,  truth 
wrapped  in  paradox. 

The  stories  collected  under  the  title  Tlie  Mother-of-Pearl 
Casket  (1892),  and  those  in  St  Clara's  Well  (1895),  call  for 
no  special  notice,  but  with  The  Cook  Shop  "  Queen  Pedauque  '* 
(la  Rotisserie  de  la  reine  Pedauque,  1893),  continued  that 
same  year  in  The  Opinions  of  Jerdme  Coignard^  he  makes  the 
novel  more  than  ever  a  chat,  a  vehicle  for  his  open  or  veiled 
scepticism.  An  English  critic  pronounces  The  Cook  Shop 
"  a  tangled  medley  of  marvels  and  mysticisms,  of  religion 
and  obscenity,"  while  the  characters  are  eighteenth-century 
reproductions  of  the  ascetic,  epicurean,  and  courtesan  of 
Thais.  Jerome  Coignard  is  called  by  Leraaitre  "  the  most 
radical  breviary  of  scepticism  since  Montaigne."  In  the 
first  there  is  little  plot,  in  the  second  none  at  all,  but 
both  scintillate  with  wit  and  irony  that  play  around  every 
aspect  of  public  and  private  life  in  a  chain  of  sparkling  epi- 
grams.    Very  much  the  same  description  would  apply  also 


336      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

to  the  last  two  volumes  of  this  smiling  philosopher's  fiction  : 
The  Elm  on  the  Mall  (I'Orme  du  Mail,  1896)  and  The 
Osier  Mannikin  (le  Mannequin  d'osier,  1897),  grouped 
under  the  title  "  contemporary  history,"  that  is,  a  reflection 
of  the  thoughts  of  typical  cultured  Frenchmen  on  matters  of 
general  interest,  with  an  impartial  smile  of  ironical  indul- 
gence for  each,  that  make  these  volumes  marvels  of  grace- 
ful perversity. 

The  hedonistic  element  in  Anatole  France  suggests  the 
robuster  materialism  of  Juliette  Adam,  who  boasts  a  pagan- 
ism that  "  distinguishes  her  from  other  women  "  and  has 
made  almost  her  whole  work  a  vigorous  plea  that,  to  those 
who  know  how  to  live,  life  for  its  own  sake  is  well  worth  liv- 
ing. Each  faculty  of  enjoyment  is  made  the  subject  of  a 
"moral  tale."  Pa'ienne  (1883),  the  most  bold,  deals  with 
material  love ;  Grecque  (1879)  ^^  a  materialistic  explanation 
of  patriotism;  Laide  (1878),  also  a  Greek  tale,  is  a  hymn 
to  physical  beauty.  But,  to  her,  Greece  and  Hellenism  are 
only  a  mask  for  a  passionate  protest  against  Christian  super- 
or  anti-naturalism,  as  she  would  say,  and  so,  as  Lemaitre 
has  observed,  it  is  really  a  protest  of  the  Aryan  against  the 
Semite,  an  endeavour  to  overcome  the  virus  of  idealism  with 
which  Christianity  has  inoculated  the  Western  world.  Thus 
her  stories  form  a  curious  prelude  to  the  anti-Semitic  agita- 
tion that  has  recently  taken  such  deep  hold  on  the  French 
masses,  while  in  literature  she  has  found  a  most  artistic 
though  dilettant  successor  in  Pierre  Louys,  the  author  of 
Aphrodite  (1896)  and  of  The  Songs  of  Bill  lis  (1897). 

This  anti-spiritualism  is  on  its  artistic  side  intimately  con- 
nected with  the  naturalistic  movement  that  we  associate  with 
the  name  of  Zola,  and  also  with  the  keen,  though  kindly 
criticism  of  French  Catholicism  in  the  novels  of  Ferdinand 


The  Generation  of  Louis  Philippe    337 

Fabre,  which  give  us  the  most  realistic  pictures  that  we 
have  of  peasant  hfe  in  the  C^vennes. 

Fabre,  who  was  born  in  1830  and  died  in  1898,  studied 
in  his  youth  for  the  priesthood,  but  presently  abandoned 
this  vocation  for  law  and  letters.      He  had  already  pub- 
lished a  volume  of  verse,  the  usual  preliminary  libation  to 
the   French   Muses,  when  failing   health   obliged   him   to 
leave  Paris  for  the  south  of  France  and  so  turned  the  cur- 
rent of  his  whole  literary  life ;  for  here  he  began  to  study 
with  literary  intent  the  clergy  among  whom  he  had  passed 
his  youth,  to  such  good  purpose  that  at  thirty-two  he  had 
written  The  Courbezons^  a  minute  analytic  study  that  earned 
him  from  Sainte-Beuve  the  title  of  "  a  strong  pupil  of  Bal- 
zac."    Many  novels  followed,  either  rustic  sketches,  or  in- 
spired by  close  observation  of  the  manners  and  mind  of  the 
clergy.     Of  these,  perhaps  the  most  noteworthy  are  Abbe 
Tigrane  (1873),  written  on  the  eve  of  the  death  of  Pius 
IX.,  and  My  Uncle  Celestine  (Mon  oncle  C^lestin,  1881). 
The  former  exhibits  the  struggle  between  the  secular  and 
regular  clergy  in  a  little  mountain  diocese,  the  passionate 
ambition  of  men  whom  celibacy  has  made  hard  and  dry, 
the  apparent  entire  transformation  of  character  when  the 
ambition  is  finally  crowned  or  crushed,  and  the  blazing,  at 
the  close,  of  the  fire  of  this  same  ambition  in  the  aged  arch- 
bishop at  the  whispered  thought  of  the  papacy.     All  this  is 
admirably  brought   out,  as  well  as  the  way  in  which  the 
clergy  move  the  laity  as  pawns  in  their  game.     But  the  full 
significance  of  the  story  appears  first  at  its  close,  when  the 
Italian   Cardinal   explains   to   his  young   pupil,  who   had 
strayed  into  the  paths  of  rectitude,  how  though  the  Church 
cannot  lie,  its  governors  do  and  ought  to  do  so,  and  how 
those  traits  in  the  character  of  Abb6  Tigrane   that  had 


338      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

seemed  to  those  simple  country  souls  a  bar  to  his  elevation 
had  been  discerned  by  the  shrewd  men  at  Rome  as  so 
many  reasons  for  it. 

My  Uncle  Celestine,  which  in  many  ways  resembles  The 
Courbezons^  shows  a  stronger,  but  a  more  sombre  art.  A 
fine  effect  of  irony  is  secured  by  putting  the  story  into  the 
mouth  of  a  boy  who  narrates  with  an  instinct  of  good,  but 
without  quite  understanding  the  purport  of  what  he  tells. 
The  scene  is  once  more  in  southern  France,  the  date  1846, 
the  central  figure  a  good  but  simply  naive  priest,  who  dies 
in  an  unsuccessful  effort  to  cope  with  the  soured  envy  of  his 
fellows  in  the  minor  clergy,  with  the  selfish  materialistic 
jealousy  of  the  petty  bourgeoisie,  with  the  animal  brutality 
and  stupidity  of  the  lower  classes,  and  with  the  vice  of  the 
parasites  of  the  Church,  the  Free  Brothers,  and  the  ped- 
dlers of  religious  objects.  He  is  too  weak  to  struggle  with 
this  environment,  and  the  few  unselfish  men  about  him  are 
too  simple.  The  work  as  a  whole  is  depressing,  but  the 
character  of  Marie  Galtier  is  certainly  a  very  delicate  bit  of 
the  psychology  of  the  humble,  and  some  of  the  country 
scenes  of  fairs  and  festivals,  with  their  strange  mixture  of 
chaffering,  gluttony,  and  religion,  are  executed  with  really 
admirable  picturesqueness,  without  minute  detail,  but  with  a 
free  hand  and  broad  effects.  But  of  course  the  chief  inter- 
est of  the  author  and  his  greatest  success  is  in  the  character 
of  Celestine,  —  so  good,  so  unselfish,  so  unworldly,  and 
therefore,  as  the  author  seems  to  say,  so  unfit  for  the  world 
he  lived  in. 

Many  stories  followed,  some  of  them  excellent  and  with 
passages  of  magnificent  description,  such  as  The  Beggars' 
New  Year  in  Sylviane  (1891),  but  all  directed,  in  one  way 
or  another,  against  the  pride  and  self-deception  of  asceti- 


The  Generation  of  Louis  Philippe    339 

cism,  so  that  the  novels  named  may  serve  as  typical,  if  not 
of  all,  at  least  of  what  is  best  in  him. 

Fabre's  place  is  quite  apart  in  our  generation.  His  robust, 
healthy  sympathy,  his  somewhat  heavy  playfulness,  his  sub- 
jects, and  his  scenes,  are  all  his  own.  None  has  painted  the 
clergy  as  he.  None  perhaps  could  have  painted  them  as  he 
has  done,  save  only  the  author  of  The  Curate  of  Tours,  The 
priest  in  France  lives  a  segregated  life,  he  is  different  from 
other  men,  and  we  feel  that  it  was  the  thought  of  an  artist 
to  give  this  foreign  life  a  foreign  setting.  We  move  in  a 
new  world  in  his  novels,  a  world  of  which  we  tire  if  we  read 
too  many  of  them  together,  but  which  leaves  so  lasting  and 
clear-cut  an  impression  that  one  finds  it  hard  to  believe 
that  these  stories  of  the  clergy  are  not  by  a  clergyman. 
Virtues  and  vices  alike  of  that  vocation  seem,  as  it  were,  re- 
vealed to  him.  As  Lemaitre  well  says.  The  Vicar  of  Wake- 
field was  a  very  worthy  man ;  Abb6  Courbezon  is  a  priest 
and  a  saint.  There  is  in  his  imprudent  charity  a  note  of 
Christian  sanctity  that  separates  it  wholly  from  philan- 
thropy ;  the  simplicity  of  Abb^  Celestine  is  that  of  the  fool- 
ish that  God  has  chosen  to  confound  the  wise,  the  direct 
result  of  education  in  a  provincial  seminary ;  and  so,  too, 
the  pride  of  Abb^  Tigrane  is  peculiar  to  those  who  think 
they  can  evoke  the  real  presence  of  God  and  turn  the  keys 
of  heaven.  The  ambition  of  the  clergy,  too,  that  all-ab- 
sorbing passion  of  power,  sharpened  and  intensified  by  celi- 
bacy, is  clearly  seen  by  Fabre,  though  here  he  yields  to  the 
transcendent  insight  of  Balzac ;  and,  finally,  he  has  suc- 
ceeded in  showing  us  the  result  of  the  normal  mind,  un- 
transformed  by  the  grace  of  orders,  in  Lucifer  (1884), 
whose  Abb6  Jourfier,  a  Galilean  liberal,  repeats,  or  rather 
anticipates,  the  experiences  of  Zola's  Abb6  Fromont,  and 


340      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

learns  at  Rome  that  there  is  no  place  for  him  there,  that 
there  is  no  possible  peace  between  the  lay  and  the  ecclesi- 
astical mind,  because  religion  is  not  nature  and  faith  is  not 
reason.  But  while  Fromont  takes  to  mechanics,  Jourfier, 
when  he  sees  that  the  merely  human  virtues  that  he  pos- 
sesses are  insufficient  for  his  vocation,  and  that  the  Church 
demands  the  sacrifice  of  his  whole  nature,  finds  submission 
impossible  and  prefers  suicide  to  revolt.  As  some  one  has 
said,  "  Fabre  never  showed  better  what  a  Catholic  priest  is 
than  in  this  picture  of  a  priest  who  is  not  one."  The  minor 
clerical  personages,  too,  are  of  great  interest.  His  peasants 
are  striking  figures,  and  if  they  seem  exaggerated,  it  is  per- 
haps because  this  rude  mountainside  breeds  intense  and 
violent  natures,  such  as  the  Rabelaisian  hermit  Barnabe,  or 
diaphanous  saints  like  Marie  Galtier. 

Therefore  it  is  that  in  his  rare  attempts  at  Parisian  life, 
for  instance,  in  The  Marquis  of  Pierrerue,  Fabre  labours 
so  ineffectually.  His  is  a  genius  that  will  not  bear  trans- 
planting. The  very  style  is  of  the  sod.  It  labours  with 
superfluous  strength ;  it  is  heavy,  but  it  is  full  of  an  earthy 
richness  and  healthy  vigour,  falling  now  and  then  to  earth 
but  rising  always  from  it  with  renewed  force,  for  he,  too, 
like  Antaeus,  is  a  child  of  nature. 

Among  the  pioneers  in  this  generation  of  what  came  to 
be  known  in  the  next  as  naturalism,  was  Duranty,  who 
abetted  in  the  early  fifties  the  brief  efforts  of  the  elder 
Champfleury  before  Madame  Bovary  had  given  respecta- 
bility to  the  movement,  and  in  three  novels  published 
between  i860  and  1862  anticipated  by  instinct  the  manner 
of  1880,  though  at  the  time  it  might  have  seemed  that  his 
stories  sprang  directly  from  Diderot,  as  though  the  romantic 
movement   had   for   him  no  existence.     His  novels  were 


The  Generation  of  Louis  Philippe    341 

never  popular,  for  the  style  is  bad  and  there  is  as  little 
fabulation  as  in  Diderot  himself,  but,  as  '*  slices  of  common- 
place life  "  coming  from  the  early  sixties,  they  form  an 
anachronism  too  curious  to  pass  unnoticed. 

The  other  novelists  born  under  the  bourgeois  king  who 
anticipated  the  manner  of  the  imperial  generation  that  was 
to  follow  are,  so  far  at  least  as  they  need  concern  us  here, 
the  Bex  brothers,  who  write  under  the  name  of  J-H. 
Rosny,  Ricard,  C^ard,  and,  far  the  most  important  of 
them  all,  Karl-Joris  Huysmans. 

Henri  C^ard  was  one  of  the  five  who  joined  with  Zola  in 
the  naturalistic  proclamation  of  The  Soirees  of  Medan,  the 
others  being  the  quite  insignificant  Hennique  and  Alexis, 
with  Maupassant  and  Huysmans,  who  were  of  too  strong  and 
independent  mind  to  be  disciples  of  any  master.  C^ard  is 
the  most  scholarly  of  the  naturaUsts,  a  man  of  very  refined 
literary  taste,  and  of  a  mind  too  critical  to  admit  of  rapid 
production.  His  criticism,  however,  acted  both  as  a  spur 
and  a  restraint  on  Daudet  and  Zola,  of  whom  he  was  a  con- 
stant friend,  and  it  is  worth  while  to  read  his  One  Fine 
Day  (une  Belle  journ^e),  and  Hennique's  Accide?if  of  M. 
Hebert  (1883),  if  only  to  see  how  far  the  pursuit  of 
"  reality  in  its  nauseous  platitude  "  can  lead  those  doctri- 
naires who  are  not  inoculated,  as  Zola  admits  that  he  was, 
with  the  virus  of  romanticism. 

The  early  novels  of  Huysmans  are  also  illustrations  of  the 
theory  that  fiction  should  be  a  slice  of  crude  life,  and  yet 
from  the  very  first  the  unique  quality  of  his  talent  set  him 
apart,  and  through  whatever  changes  he  has  since  passed, 
his  isolation  has  been  more  complete  than  that  of  any 
other  novelist  of  his  time.  His  is  a  restless  spirit,  of  insa- 
tiable curiosity  and  subtle   nervous  susceptibility,  sincere 


342     A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

but  not  always  coherent,  with  artistic  melancholy,  as 
though  he  were  homesick  for  the  days  of  the  Latin  deca- 
dence. His  novels  picture  the  evolution  of  his  soul  from 
sensual  materialism  and  aggressive  naturalism  through 
spiritism  and  satanism  to  a  Christian  mysticism  and  spirit- 
ualism that  has  in  it  still  a  curious  strain  of  the  sensual  and 
material.  His  novels  lose  half  their  significance,  or  rather 
they  acquire  a  wholly  false  significance,  if  we  regard  them 
apart  from  their  sequence. 

His  work  in  fiction  begins  with  Marthe  in  1877,  the 
year  of  Goncourt's  Eliza  and  of  Zola's  Asso77imoir.  His 
subject  is  of  the  same  class  as  Eliza  and  the  treatment  as 
painfully  realistic  and  perhaps  even  more  sordid,  so  that  Zola 
might  justly  claim  that  Huysmans  was  a  pupil  of  Edmond 
de  Goncourt  rather  than  of  himself.  In  The  Vatard  Sisters 
(les  Soeurs  Vatard,  1879)  the  resemblance  to  the  Goncourts 
is  even  more  marked  in  the  strained,  excessively  coloured 
style,  and  in  a  Dutch  minuteness  and  acuteness  of  vision 
that  suggest  the  descendant  of  the  seventeenth-century 
Flemish  painter  Huysmans  de  Malines,  whose  name  he 
bears.  He  does  not  see  types,  but  individuals ;  he  does 
not  paint  life,  but  only  a  corner  of  it ;  his  bindery  girls,  the 
Vatard  sisters,  are  not  typical  of  their  class ;  and  what  is 
more  they  are  not  agreeable  individuals  to  the  reader. 
Indeed  the  author  seems  often  a  (Jilettant  of  moral 
anguish,  sordid  wretchedness,  and  contemptible  vice,  who 
sneers  with  a  hollow  laugh  at  his  own  creations.  Or  was 
he  a  victim  of  his  pessimism,  possessed  as  by  a  nightmare 
with  the  baseness  of  life  ? 

Such  at  least  might  seem  to  be  the  state  of  mind  that 
produced  the  abdominal  preoccupations  of  Knapsacks 
(Sac  au  dos,  1880)  and  Housekeeping  (En  manage,  1881), 


The  Generation  of  Louis  Philippe    343 

a  cynical  commendation  of  marriage.  So,  too,  the  volume 
of  stories  under  the  title  Down  Stream  (A  vau  I'eau,  1882) 
has  earned  an  unenviable  eminence  for  the  nauseating 
minuteness  of  its  description  of  the  dishes  displayed  in  the 
windows  of  cheap  restaurants,  side  by  side  with  Zola's  simi- 
lar stylistic  feat,  the  "symphony  in  cheeses"  oi  Parisian 
Digestio7i. 

It  is  with  Topsy-Turvy  (A  rebours,  1884),  that  Huysmans 
first  turns  from  description  of  cross-sections  of  life  under  a 
Dutch  microscope  to  introspection,  and  awakens  in  the 
reader  a  strong  curiosity,  if  not  interested  sympathy,  in  the 
psychic  condition  of  the  author.  In  this  prose  poem  of 
neurosity,  that  has  been  called  a  "  complete  course  in  in- 
tellectual voluptuousness,"  we  see  him  turning  in  fierce 
desperation  from  materialism  to  a  kind  of  frenzied  spiritism. 
Goethe  shrewdly  remarked  the  inconsistency  of  real  natural- 
ism with  pessimism,  and  this  is  what  Esseintes,  who  doubt- 
less is  Huysmans  himself,  is  here  experiencing.  His 
pessimism  is  driving  him,  as  it  did  Baudelaire,  "  to  the  bot- 
tom of  the  unknown  to  find  the  new."  He  tells  us  how  "  all 
that  transfigured  or  deformed  reality  enchanted  him,"  how 
in  eager  search  for  unreal  pleasures  he  sought  elaborate 
artificiality  of  sensations,  till  he  became  at  the  close  "an 
unbeliever  who  would  fain  believe,"  the  influences  of  the 
Jesuit  education  of.  his  youth  voicing  themselves  in  the 
sceptic's  prayer :  "  Lord,  have  pity  on  the  Christian  who 
doubts,  on  the  unbeliever  who  wills  to  believe,  on  the  crim- 
inal who  embarks  alone  at  night  under  a  sky  no  longer 
lighted  by  the  consoling  torches  of  the  old  hope." 

Surely  here  is  a  most  radical  and  interesting  experience 
in  psychical  development,  and  every  novel  that  follows 
marks  a  new  step  in  this  evolution  and  adds  new  interest  to 


344      ^  Century  of  French  Fiction 

our  study  of  Huysmans.  It  is  interesting  to  note  also 
that  Topsy-Tzirvy  coincides  in  date  with  the  first  novel  of 
Bourget,  so  that  1884  may  mark  for  us  the  advent  of  the 
so-called  psychologic  school,  or  better,  the  transformation  of 
an  external  into  a  psychic  naturalism,  though  Huysmans  is 
with  rather  than  of  this  new  company.  His  place  is  as 
much  apart  here  as  it  had  been  with  the  followers  of  Zola. 

For  a  time  the  effect  of  the  state  of  soul  indicated  in 
Topsy-Tumy  was  to  slacken  production.  At  Anchor  (En 
rade),  that  followed  in  1887,  may  well  have  been  written 
before  Topsy-TuTiy^  or  in  a  moment  of  reaction,  for  it  is 
nearer  his  old  position.  But  both  this  and  the  short 
stories  collected  under  the  title  A  Dilemma  (un  Dilemme, 
1887)  are  insignificant,  and  it  is  m  Beyond  (La-bas,  1891) 
that  we  first  note  an  obvious  advance,  though  by  a  spiral 
that  carried  him  downward ;  for  here  a  dilettant  pessimism 
has  led  him  through  morbid  brooding  on  the  diabolical 
monstrosities  of  the  medieval  Gilles  de  Rais  into  an 
endeavour  to  decide  the  contest  within  him  between  lust 
and  dyspepsia  by  experiments  with  astrology  and  satanism. 

Beyond  opens  with  a  literary  profession  of  faith.  He 
forswears  naturalism  in  literature  and  life,  for  he  finds  that 
Zola  is  incarnate  materialism  glorifying  democracy  and 
having  for  his  followers  the  bourgeois  offspring  of  Homais 
{Madame  Bovary)  and  Lisa  (^Parisian  Digestion) .  His  new 
hero  Durtal  is  still  Huysmans'  self,  and  his  point  of  view 
is  described  as  "spiritualistic  naturalism."  "This  age  of 
positivists  and  atheists,"  he  says,  "  has  overturned  all  except 
satanism;  that  it  has  not  forced  back  a  step,"  for  "the 
greatest  power  of  Satan  lies  in  this,  that  he  gets  men  to 
deny  him."  The  book,  then,  marks  a  recrudescence  of  the 
occult,  a  reassertion  of  the  extra-natural,  a  fascinated  hover- 


The  Generation  of  Louis  Philippe    345 

ing  about  a  mystic  Catholicism,  sure  to  lead  to  such  Chris- 
tianity as  is  consistent  with  a  discouraged  pessimism  in 
regard  to  society  and  the  world.  The  book  itself,  however, 
is  a  distinctly  disagreeable  medley  of  medieval  and  modern 
nastiness,  into  which  the  author  has  emptied  a  barrel  of 
notes  on  Rosicrusianism  and  demonology,  forming  a  wel- 
tering mass  fit  to  be  the  habitation  of  "  a  seraglio  of  hystero- 
epileptics  and  erotomaniacs." 

But  this  book  is,  as  it  were,  the  hell  into  which  Huysmans 
must  needs  descend  that  he  might  climb  the  hill  of  purga- 
tory in  On  the  Road  (En  route,  1896),  and  enter  his 
paradise  in  The  Cathedi'al  (1897).  On  the  Road  v^  in- 
deed, as  an  American  critic  has  said,  "one  of  the  most 
characteristic  novels  of  our  quarter-century,"  and  shows 
how  much  more  ready  the  France  of  our  decade  is  than 
that  of  the  eighties  to  listen  for  a  voice  from  the  Beyond. 
It  introduces  Durtal  in  the  crisis  of  his  conversion,  of  his 
struggle  of  doubt  for  faith.  It  is  the  drama  of  a  soul  sick 
of  sense,  tired  of  self,  with  no  wish  to  pray,  yet  drawn  by 
the  beauty  of  holiness,  by  the  magnet  of  Christian  art,  to 
the  Church,  that  "  only  hospital  for  souls."  Constantly 
falling  he  stumbles  on,  admirably  directed  by  Abb6  Grevesin, 
till  at  last  the  leaven  of  pity  ferments  to  a  passion  of  sacrifice, 
and  so  brings  Durtal  to  a  dawning  instinct  of  divine  love. 

This  plea  for  the  contemplative  Hfe  will  seem  morbid  and 
perverse  to  many  who  will  admire  its  scholarship  and  its 
artistic  appreciation.  Durtal  seems  throughout  still  a  fas- 
tidious eclectic  hedonist,  trying  to  reconcile  faith  with  con- 
tempt for  the  faithful.  There  is  deep  converse  on  the  "law 
of  substitution,"  on  sanctity  and  detachment  from  the 
world ;  there  are  striking  passages  on  the  emotional  effect 
of  plain-song;  yet  nowhere  do  we  see  clear  and  full  the 


346     A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

finger  of  duty,  but  only  the  reaction  of  an  excessive  and 
effeminate  culture  into  a  petty  artistic  mysticism,  that  last 
infirmity  of  esthetic  minds  who  never  get  beyond  those 
**  brightest  transports,  choicest  prayers  that  bloom  an  hour 
and  fade." 

There  is  in  On  the  Road  a  great  deal  of  sharp  criticism 
of  the  Church,  old  and  new,  in  France,  and  this  often  finds 
expression  in  words  of  shocking  crudity  that  we  feel  to  be 
of  deliberate  intention.  Huysmans  did  not  come  into  the 
Church  like  other  men  by  the  common  door,  but,  as  a  good 
abbess  said,  "  he  entered  it  through  the  roof,"  repelled  by 
a  clergy  whose  ignorant  obtuseness  took  from  them  "all 
influence  over  the  patriarchate  of  souls,"  but  attracted  by 
the  symbolic  obscurities  of  medieval  art  and  ritual.  Durtal 
is  still  a  misanthropic  impressionist,  who  loves  to  despise 
and  to  hate.  A  long  retreat  among  the  Trappists  does  not 
restore  virility  to  his  faith,  though  it  affords  Huysmans  occa- 
sion for  a  most  living  picture  of  aTrappist  monastery,  of  which 
he  had  been  for  some  time  an  inmate,  so  that  it  is  said  that 
all  his  monks,  even  the  swineherd  saint,  Simeon,  a  modem 
Junipero,  stepping  as  it  were  fresh  out  of  the  Little  Flowers 
of  St.  Francis f  were  his  friends  at  Notre- Dame  d'lgny. 
Durtal's  struggles  here  are  told  in  a  glowing  style,  with  an 
almost  fierce  enthusiasm  for  the  medieval  thesis  that  faith 
is  contagious,  and  that  sensuous  natures  have  the  profound- 
est  spiritual  potentialities.  Yet  the  lame  conclusion  of  all 
is  that  Durtal  leaves  the  Trappists  "  his  mind  undone,  his 
heart  in  shreds  .  .  .  too  much  a  man  of  letters  to  be  a 
monk,  too  much  a  monk  to  stay  among  men  of  letters." 

From  the  purgatory  of  On  the  Road  Durtal  is  carried  to 
the  door  of  a  benedictine  paradise  in  The  Cathedral,  What 
he  found  there  will  form  the  subject  of  The  Oblate,  but  it  is 


The  Generation  of  Louis  Philippe    347 

reasonably  certain  that  this  "  fingering  of  spiritual  muscles 
to  see  if  they  are  growing"  will  not  bring  a  healthy  growth, 
though  it  may  procure  a  hypnotised  peace  for  those  proud 
and  delicate  spirits  who  claim,  with  Huysmans,  to  need  a 
refuge  in  the  cloister,  for  the  soul  and  for  art,  from  the 
moral  and  physical  hideousness  of  the  world.  Tlie  Cathe- 
dral contains  descriptions  of  wonderful  beauty ;  but  it  is 
not  for  this  that  we  dwell  upon  it  here,  but  because  it  is 
a  sign  of  the  times,  of  an  age  weary  of  material  progress, 
weary  of  all  except  of  searching  those  problems  of  the 
soul  that  defy  solution.  These  last  novels  of  Huysmans  are 
the  supreme  products  of  a  morbid  state  of  soul,  of  which 
the  novelists  of  the  next  generation  will  give  us  many 
illustrations,  as  indeed,  Huysmans'  contemporaries  in  birth 
Ricard  and  "J-H.  Rosny  "  do  also,  of  whom  it  has  been 
happily  said  that  they  throw  the  dry  salts  of  Stendhal  into 
the  juleps  of  Feuillet,  and  produce  pastilles,  half  salt,  half 
sugar,  the  literature  of  Vichy-water,  a  morbid  and  laboured 
jargon  of  science  and  psychology.  Of  them  we  need  speak 
no  further,  but  of  Huysmans  it  is  only  just  to  say  that  what- 
ever his  faults  of  taste,  and  they  are  many,  however  recon- 
dite his  vocabulary,  however  invertebrate  the  structure  of 
his  narrations,  yet  no  novelist  since  Bunyan  has  given  us 
such  a  study  as  he,  so  frank  and  yet  so  subtle,  of  the 
progress  of  a  pilgrim  soul. 


CHAPTER  XVI 

GUY   DE   MAUPASSANT 

GUY  DE  MAUPASSANT  deserves  a  place  apart,  though 
a  minor  one,  among  the  novelists  of  the  imperial  gen- 
eration, first,  because  he  was,  at  least  in  his  earlier  years, 
the  most  completely  naturalistic  of  modern  French  writers, 
in  the  accurate  sense  of  naturalism,  and,  secondly,  because 
he  is  the  greatest  modern  master  of  a  minor  genre  that  is 
peculiarly  French,  the  short  story,  which  in  his  hands,  as 
in  that  of  its  former  masters,  is  not  a  condensed  novel  nor 
a  novelette,  but  rather  the  exhibition  of  character  through 
a  single  episode,  or  of  the  episode  itself  as  a  commentary 
on  life. 

A  third  characteristic  of  Maupassant  is  his  style,  and  as 
this  remains  almost  unaltered  throughout  his  work,  and  is 
the  quality  in  which  his  early  training  is  most  apparent, 
it  naturally  claims  first  attention.  It  shows  the  Norman, 
born  in  Lower  Seine,  educated  at  Rouen,  and  for  ten  years 
the  favourite  and  almost  constant  disciple  of  Flaubert,  whose 
hard  mechanical  perfection  he  was  to  carry  to  even  higher 
reaches  of  verbal  photography.  The  man  of  these  early 
years  seemed  the  counterpart  of  the  style  of  his  first  story, 
Suet-Ball  (Boule  de  suif,  1878),  robust,  sane,,  material, 
but  with  a  canny,  keen,  and  vivid  vision.  Flaubert  had 
given  his  pupil  his  exact  brevity,  his  sharp  concision,  some- 
thing,   too,  of  his  malicious  joy  in  the  pettiness  of  man- 


Guy  de  Maupassant  349 

kind,  but  he  had  not  transmitted  to  him  anything  of  his 
own  heritage  from  romanticism,  that  **  splendid  subdued 
richness  and  harmonious  movement "  of  which  Mr.  Sy- 
monds  speaks.  Maupassant's  style  is  a  combination  of 
veracity  and  vigour,  of  strength  and  terseness,  but  it  lacks 
undertones.  Whole  ranges  of  emotion  are  foreign  to  him. 
His  humour  is  often  boisterous.  Rabelaisian,  rarely  tender, 
and  he  never  descends  with  Bourget  into  the  "  pottering 
and  peddling  of  psychology."  Indeed,  we  may  go  further 
and  say  that  though  his  fiction  is  never  without  its  moral 
bearing,  he  begins  by  looking  at  life  wholly  from  the  animal 
side,  and  quite  leaves  the  soul  out  of  his  reckoning,  being 
even  at  his  worst  less  immoral  than  unmoral,  that  is,  natu- 
ralistic. So  Zola,  speaking  at  the  unveiling  of  his  monu- 
ment, recognised  in  him  "  one  of  our  own,  a  Latin  of  good, 
clear,  solid  head,  a  maker  of  beautiful  sentences  shining 
like  gold,  pure  as  the  diamond,  ...  a  child  of  the  great 
writers  of  France,  a  ray  from  the  good  sun  that  fecundates 
our  soil,  ripens  our  vines  and  our  corn.  He  was  loved 
because  he  was  of  our  family  and  was  not  ashamed  of  it, 
and  because  he  showed  pride  in  having  the  good  sense,  logic, 
balance,  power,  and  clearness  of  the  old  French  blood." 

Allied  to  classic  tradition  in  mode  of  thought,  he  is  so 
even  more  in  language.  His  vocabulary  is  very  restricted, 
and  he  seems  bent  rather  on  making  fuller  use  of  old  words 
than  on  discovering  new  ones.  Yet  his  words  and  sen- 
tences have  not  only  a  lapidarian  simplicity  and  clearness, 
they  carry  remarkable  effects  of  colour  and  plastic  in  de- 
scription of  city  and  country,  of  mountain  and  sea,  and  in 
the  shock  of  simple  characters,  for  he  avoids  psychic  as  he 
does  stylistic  complexity.  Neither  is  normal,  and  so  neither 
is  naturalistic. 


350     A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

But,  while  from  first  to  last  there  is  no  development  in 
technic  in  Maupassant,  there  is  change  in  his  ethics,  and 
here  first  it  becomes  necessary  to  consider  his  work  in  its 
chronology.  He  began,  as  most  French  literary  men  have 
done,  with  a  volume  of  verses  (Des  vers,  1880),  printing 
in  the.  same  year  his  first  and  one  of  his  best  tales,  a  tragi- 
comedy in  miniature,  Suet- Ball  (Boule  de  suif)  in  The 
Soirees  of  Me  dan  (1880).  The  poems,  while  prevaihngly 
sensualistic,  suggesting  the  gambols  of  a  lusty  young  bull, 
show  here  and  there  a  tendency  to  analysis,  and  also  an 
inclination  to  brooding  visions  of  horror,  that  seemed  at 
the  time  the  sport  of  a  sceptical  dilettant  of  emotion,  but 
came  later  to  have  a  terrible  pathologic  significance.  In 
Suet-Ball  one  notes  what  seems  to  be  a  similar  moral  dilet- 
tantism, a  sympathy  with  outcasts  and  scapegoats  as  such, 
because  they  are  the  victims  of  a  social  morality  that  seems 
to  this  pupil  of  Flaubert  purely  artificial  and  adventitious. 
He  is  constantly  dwelling  with  pleasure  on  what  he  calls 
"  the  capacity  for  sudden  innocent  delights  latent  in  natures 
that  have  lost  their  innocence." 

This  story  proved  him  a  master-workman,  sure  of  his 
processes  and  of  his  tools,  and  during  the  next  ten  years 
he  produced  an  average  of  more  than  two  volumes  annually, 
embracing  six  novels  and  some  two  hundred  and  twelve 
short  stories  of  most  varied  interest  and  value,  though  this 
difference  is  due  more  to  their  subjects  than  to  their  art. 
The  moral  change  to  which  allusion  has  been  made  is  more 
obvious  in  the  novels  than  in  the  tales,  and  to  them,  there- 
fore, it  is  best  first  to  direct  attention. 

The  ethical  position  of  the  author  of  A  Life  (une  Vie, 
1883)  is  nihilism.  The  purpose  of  this  novel,  which  Tol- 
stoi thought  the  best  in  France  since  Hugo's  MiserableSy  is 


Guy  de  Maupassant  351 

to  bear  witness  to  the  purposelessness  of  suffering.  With 
astonishing  power  and  crudity  he  paints  the  hard,  naked, 
sordid  reality  of  shallow  joys  and  bottomless  sadness. 
Nowhere  has  novelist  stripped  and  scourged  so  cruelly  the 
bestial  lubricity  that,  according  to  Gaston  Deschamps, 
"  hides  itself,  cruel  and  avid,  under  silk  hats  and  dress- 
coats."  He  has  here  at  the  outset  a  disdain  of  humanity 
as  strong  as  Flaubert's,  a  disdain  resulting  in  his  generation 
from  the  repeated  deceptions  of  1848,  of  185 1,  and  of 
1870,  and  fostered  by  the  scientific  habit  of  thought,  the 
materialistic  determinism  of  Taine.  "  He  came  into  the 
world,"  says  a  French  critic,  "just  at  the  time  when  most 
of  the  dreams  and  mirages  were  being  extinguished  that 
till  then  had  embellished  human  life ;  he  underwent  the 
oppression  of  so  many  experiments,  of  so  many  acquired 
notions,  of  such  prodigious  labour  ending  in  the  eclipse  of 
the  ideal  and  a  tyrannous  nightmare  of  reality.  He  felt 
the  mental  fatigue  that  followed  so  many  generous  efforts  to 
know  the  nature  of  things,  and  suffered  from  it,  more  per- 
haps than  the  robust  workers  of  our  disillusions." 

The  futility  of  a  life  of  sacrifice,  as  daughter,  wife,  and 
mother,  of  one  who  tries  to  be  a  little  noble  in  an  ignoble 
world,  is  unable  to  respect  those  to  whom  she  is  united, 
father,  mother,  foster-sister,  husband,  and  son,  and  finds 
the  pathetic  consolation  of  her  old  age  in  the  care  of  an 
orphan  grandchild  born  to  an  inheritance  of  vice,  —  such  is 
life's  mocking  irony  as  Maupassant  sees  it  in  A  Life  ;  and 
there  is  the  same  moral  nihilism  in  Bel- Ami  (1885),  a 
novel  that  recalls  Marivaux's  Parvenu  Countryman  and  the 
Perverted  Countryman  of  La  Bretonne.  All  these  are 
stories  of  men  who  use  sex  as  a  means  of  social  advance- 
ment.    If  A   Life  was   the   defeat   of  virtue,  this   is  the 


352      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

triumph  of  vice,  and,  since  both  are  fatal  products  of  pre- 
existing conditions,  the  author  is  as  morally  indifferent  to 
one  as  to  the  other.  He  still  paints  life  as  he  sees  it,  with 
the  frank,  bustling  indelicacy  of  Smollett,  with  a  robust 
animalism  to  which  the  individual  life  has  no  sense  apart  from 
the  life  of  the  cosmos,  the  sense  of  which  is  so  obviously  in- 
comprehensible that  he  makes  no  effort  to  comprehend  it. 

This  pessimism,  even  at  the  outset,  is  radically  different 
from  Flaubert's  sterile  contempt  or  from  Zola's  tireless 
social  discontent.  Maupassant's  world-pain  is  mortal  ear- 
nest, and  during  these  years  of  literary  triumph  he  is  living 
as  he  believes,  as  though  life  were  a  succession  of  fatalities. 
It  was  not  enough  for  him  to  know  that  the  world  was 
senseless  and  bad.  There  was  in  him,  in  spite  of  all  and 
from  the  very  first,  a  terror  of  annihilation  for  which  he 
could  find  no  anodyne.  In  Bel- Ami  we  have  a  description 
of  the  slow  deterioration  of  a  brain  by  a  fixed  idea  of  death. 
Lemaitre  tells  us  that  at  this  time  Maupassant  would  with- 
draw for  months  to  the  solitude  of  some  country  retreat  or 
of  the  sea,  that  he  would  desperately  attempt  a  return  to  a 
purely  physical  animal  life  and  then  seek  escape  from  self 
in  feverish  amusements,  orgies  of  luxury  or  infantile  sports, 
"  but  save  for  the  minutes  when  he  was  busy  in  them  never 
did  one  see  such  impassivity  in  mid-festival,  nor  face  more 
absent." 

A  Life  and  Bel- Ami  were  biographies  treated  with  ironic 
fatalism.  Mont-Oriol  (1887)  marks  a  change  from  biog- 
raphy to  drama.  It  is  not  a  complete  life,  but  an  episode 
in  the  life  of  a  Don  Juan  leading  to  crises  in  the  lives  of 
two  women.  There  are  a  number  of  good  minor  charac- 
ters, however,  and  more  action  and  bustling  humour  than  in 
A  Life  or  Bel-Ami.     It  shows  a  transition  in  method,  and. 


Guy  de  Maupassant  353 

when  compared  with  some  short  stories  of  the  same  year 
and  with  the  novel  that  immediately  followed,  it  suggests 
that  from  now  on  we  have  to  deal  with  two  Maupassants : 
the  one  a  victim  of  mental  disease  springing  from  morbid 
speculation  on  the  essential  misery  of  man,  and  nursed  by 
the  scientific  investigations  by  which  he  assisted  in  the  cor- 
rosion of  his  brain ;  and  then,  beside  this  noble,  unstrung 
soul,  the  Maupassant  of  intervals  of  lucid  calm  reaching  out 
toward  a  moral  ideal  that  still  eludes  his  comprehension. 
So  there  is  in  Mont-Oriol  a.  beginning  of  sympathy  and 
therefore  of  ethical  confusion,  and  this  moral  uncertainty  is 
continued  and  intensified  in  Fe/er  and  John  (Pierre  et  Jean, 
1888),  which  artistically  is  his  best  novel  and  shows  an 
almost  unique  power  of  isolating  and  projecting  a  scene, 
though  that  is  a  quality  that  belongs  rather  to  the  short 
story.  Here  the  fixed  idea  that  had  been  an  episode  in 
Bel-Ami  becomes  the  mainspring  of  the  narrative.  John 
receives  an  unexpected  inheritance.  Peter  broods  in  mor- 
bid jealousy  till  he  becomes  the  inquisitor,  the  judge,  and 
tormentor  of  his  mother,  whom  he  forces  at  last,  without  a 
spoken  word,  to  confess  to  John  the  shame  of  his  origin, 
and  of  domestic  hfe  built  upon  a  lie.  Here  more  than  in 
Motit  Oriol  the  author  betrays  his  own  emotion,  a  reaching 
out  for  a  moral  basis  of  life.  There  is  here,  and  in  general 
in  these  years,  less  preoccupation  with  sex.  Love  tends  to 
become  less  material,  and  the  author's  horror  of  lonehness 
gives  it  sometimes,  as  between  John  and  his  mother,  the 
form  of  a  league  against  the  evil  of  Hfe.  In  her  "  tender 
shop-cashier's  soul "  he  has  drawn  with  sympathetic  deli- 
cacy the  struggle  of  a  great  sentiment  in  a  petty  nature. 
He  is  still  moving  here,  as  in  Mont  Oriol^  toward  a  spiritual 
conception  of  life. 

23 


354      ^  Century  of  French  Fiction 

In  Strong  as  Death  (Fort  comme  la  mort,  1889)  and 
Our  Heaf't  (Notre  Coeur,  1890)  there  is  perhaps  further 
accentuation  of  this  moral  unrest,  while  the  dread  of  the 
unknowable  beyond  broods  over  both  stories  and  points  the 
way  to  haunting  hallucination  and  madness.  Strong  as 
Death  is  a  book  of  great  but  uncanny  power.  An  artist, 
Olivier,  has  in  the  flush  of  young  genius  loved  Countess 
Anne.  He  is  now  fifty  and  her  daughter  has  grown  to  the 
age  and  image  of  the  mother  he  had  once  loved.  Uncon- 
sciously the  new  illusion  of  youth  replaces  the  old  love. 
Countess  Anne  sees  sooner  than  Olivier  what  is  passing  in 
his  heart,  and  tries  with  pathetic  desperation  to  renew  her 
youth.  He,  when  he  perceives  his  true  self,  is  as  tortured 
as  she.  Powerless  to  aid,  they  witness  one  another's  tor- 
ture, till  Olivier  seeks  in  death  escape  from  the  curse  of 
age.  The  novel  is  highly  romantic  in  subject,  intensely 
realistic  in  execution.  These  are  every-day  people,  who  do 
what  many  do,  yet  perish  in  despair  of  life  and  love.  The 
book  is  a  power,  but  for  ill,  because  Maupassant  has  infused 
in  it  the  contagion  of  his  own  perturbed  spirit.  He  was 
struggling  to  light  but  sinking  into  darkness. 

In  Our  Heart  the  struggle  and  the  submerging  is  nearly 
completed.  The  mind  from  which  the  ideal  had  been 
driven,  the  swept  and  garnished  house  of  his  nihilism  is  now 
possessed  by  evil  spirits.  Nature  is  herself  no  longer  true. 
His  hero  feels,  like  the  heroine  of  his  Useless  Beauty 
(ITnutile  beauts,  1890),  "suddenly  by  a  sort  of  intuition, 
that  that  being  (the  lady  of  his  choice)  was  not  merely  a 
woman  destined  to  perpetuate  the  race,  but  the  bizarre  and 
mysterious  product  of  all  our  complex  desires  amassed  in 
us  by  centuries,  turned  from  their  primitive  and  divine  end, 
erring  toward  a  beauty  half- seen,  mystic,   and   incompre- 


Guy  de  Maupassant  355 

hensible."  There  are  in  Our  Heart  as  beautiful  pages  of 
natural  description  as  Maupassant  ever  wrote,  but  we  feel 
that,  for  his  sake  and  ours,  it  was  time  that  the  curtain 
should  fall.  This  work  is  no  longer  un- moral,  it  is,  like 
Baudelaire's  Floivers  of  Evil^  immoral,  monstrous.  He  is 
haunted  by  evil  in  all  that  he  tries  to  depict  as  good.  Un- 
certain ideals  have  replaced  a  solid  and  sufficing  material- 
ism with  its  confident  proclamation  of  Art  for  Art,  and  this 
cannot  but  be  fatal  to  any  wholeness  of  literary  impression. 

That  moral  disintegration  would  naturally  be  much  less 
marked  in  the  short  stories,  which  in  the  nature  of  the  case 
may  represent  only  a  phase  or  passing  mood  of  the  author's 
mind.  Here  we  shall  find  at  the  outset  work  that  might 
have  been  done  at  the  end,  and  in  the  last  volume  tales 
that  would  not  have  surprised  in  the  first,  though,  if  we  take 
the  general  impression,  Le  Horla^  of  1887,  and  all  the  col- 
lections that  follow  it,  will  be  found  to  differ  materially  from 
all  that  precede.  Knowing  what  the  novels  have  taught  us, 
it  is  possible  to  corroborate  it  from  the  tales,  but  it  is  not 
necessary  to  do  so  and  more  is  gained  by  considering  them 
without  regard  to  their  chronology. 

It  is  these  short  stories  that  made  his  fame,  and  it  is  they 
perhaps  that  will  longest  preserve  it.  Men  who  read  Suet- 
Ball  in  1880,  or  Tellier  House  (la  Maison  Tellier,  188 1), 
or  Miss  Fiji  (Mademoiselle  Fifi,  1883),  and  the  stories 
bound  with  them,  felt  here  in  a  form  thoroughly  modern  the 
renascence  of  a  spirit  as  old  as  French  literature.  Mau- 
passant offered,  says  a  French  critic,  "the  singular  phe- 
nomenon of  a  sort  of  primitive  classic  in  a  period  of  aging, 
decrepit,  artificial  literature.  Ignorant  ahke  of  the  artistic 
transpositions  of  the  Goncourts  and  the  nervous  trepida- 
tion of  Daudet,  Maupassant  gushed  out  like  a  spring  of 


356      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

clear,  sparkling  water."  His  early  training  and  his  theory 
of  fiction,  as  developed  in  a  preface  to  Peter  and  John,  pre- 
disposed him  to  this  form  of  composition,  which  has  been 
peculiarly  French  since  the  days  when  fabliaus  amused  the 
people,  while  the  nobles  nursed  their  chivalry  on  the  aris- 
tocratic epics.  From  the  outset  this  genre  had  been 
realistic,  eminently  unspiritual,  sometimes  coarse,  often  bru- 
tal, and  such  remain  the  characteristics  of  the  short  story  as 
we  find  it  in  the  prose  of  La  Salle,  of  Des  P^riers,  of  Noel 
de  Fail,  and  Margaret  of  Navarre,  and  in  the  verses  of  La 
Fontaine,  with  whom  Maupassant  has  more  in  common  than 
with  the  artificial  raconteurs  of  the  eighteenth  century,  or 
with  any  of  his  immediate  predecessors,  Daudet,  Banville, 
Copp^e,  HaMvy,  Gyp,  and  the  rest.  There  is,  indeed,  more 
convention  in  La  Fontaine,  both  in  character  and  environ- 
ment, for  he  has  the  classic  desire  to  be  universal,  while 
Maupassant  wishes  to  be  realistic.  The  scene  of  a  tale  of 
La  Fontaine  might  be  in  France,  Italy,  or  Utopia;  with 
Maupassant  we  know  always  that  we  are  in  Normandy,  or 
in  the  Riviera,  or  at  Paris,  and  that,  were  the  scene 
changed,  the  story  must  change  also.  And  so  with  the 
characters.  La  Fontaine  has  hardly  more  than  eight  stock 
figures  :  the  peasant,  the  well-to-do  middle-class  man,  mer- 
chant or  judge,  the  enterprising  youth,  the  curate  and  the 
monk,  the  lusty  servant  girl,  the  amorous  nun,  the  silly 
country  lass,  the  burgher's  wife.  In  Maupassant,  on  the 
other  hand,  all  are  individualised.  Suet-Ball  is  herself  and 
none  other.  All  the  sheep  of  Madame  Tellier's  flock  are 
individuals.  We  should  feel  a  jar  at  any  moment  if  the 
acts  of  one  were  attributed  to  another.  But  in  general  the 
subjects  are  the  same,  and  the  point  of  view  is  the  absence 
of  any  moral  law  whatsoever. 


Guy  de  Maupassant  357 

Of  course  an  immediate  result  of  this  naturalism  is  a 
frankness  of  speech  regarding  things  that  Anglo-Saxons  are 
agreed  had  better  not  be  mentioned.  No  doubt,  too,  there 
are  people  who  read  Maupassant  as  pigs  root  for  truffles ;  and 
they  will  find  what  they  look  for,  though  he  did  not  put  it 
there  for  them,  but  simply  that  he  might  paint  a  bit  of  life 
as  he  saw  it,  with  a  sensuous  preoccupation  that,  as  moralists 
long  ago  observed,  implies  always  a  certain  moroseness,  which 
in  him  finds  vent  usually  in  tales  of  Norman  brutaUty,  bestial- 
ity, and  egoism,  while  he  pours  his  contempt  on  the  conven- 
tional morality  of  society  in  tales  of  Paris,  and  chooses  the 
war  of  1870  to  show,  not  the  virtues  of  racial  solidarity,  but 
the  unchaining  of  the  beast  that  seems  to  him  to  lurk  even 
in  the  most  peaceful  natures.  The  humour  of  the  stories  in 
lighter  vein  is  dry,  ironical,  based  on  a  grotesque  contrast 
between  human  nature  and  its  ideals.  Very  rarely  at  the 
outset  we  get  a  breath  of  airy  cheerfulness,  as  in  Simon^s 
Papa,  and  occasionally  there  is  already  the  note  of  despair 
and  suicide,  as  in  Madame  Paul. 

Maupassant's  first  year  of  publication  will  thus  illustrate 
all  the  tendencies  that  we  shall  find  in  his  later  volumes,  ex- 
cept the  story  of  psychological  analysis  that  shows  itself 
first  in  Monsieur  Parent,  of  1884,  and  the  rare  elegiac 
notes  as  in  Menuet,  of  1883.  Any  effort  to  classify  Mau- 
passant's tales  is  sure  to  satisfy  no  one,  least  of  all  the  clas- 
sifier. Yet  if  we  bear  in  mind  the  dates  of  the  several 
volumes  and  classify  less  by  the  externals  of  situation  —  dis- 
tinguishing, for  instance,  tales  of  Normandy,  of  Parisian  aris- 
tocracy or  clerks,  and  of  travel  —  than  by  the  outlook  on  life 
that  the  tales  show,  we  may  reach  some  suggestive  results, 
though  within  these  limits  it  is  possible  to  allude  only  to 
the  best. 


358      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

Of  the  tales  thus  classified,  the  smallest  group  is  that  of 
hearty,  bluif,  good-humoured  cheer.  There  are  not  more 
than  a  dozen  of  these  in  all,  none  of  them  written  after 
1886.  Typical  of  this  tone  is  Simon's  Papa  (le  Papa  de 
Simon)  or  The  Ideas  of  the  Colonel  (les  Id^es  du  colonel). 
The  stories  of  this  type  are  sound  and  healthy,  and  nearly 
as  much  may  be  claimed  for  the  more  numerous  narratives 
of  pathos  and  elegy,  which  are  rare  before  1884  and  found 
chiefly  between  1886  and  1889.  Miss  Harriet  and  The 
Baptism  in  the  same  volume  (there  is  another  story  with  a 
like  title)  illustrate  this  division.  There  is  a  dainty  elegiac 
note  in  Mademoiselle  Perle^  an  infinite  sadness  in  Clochette^ 
and  a  strange  exotic  languor  in  Chdli.  In  this  direction 
his  first  attempts,  and  indeed  the  only  ones  before  Miss 
Harriet,  were  two  efforts  to  catch  the  tone  of  eighteenth- 
century  sentiment,  Menuet  and  The  Bedstead  (le  Lit) . 

Many  times  more  frequent  than  either  of  these  modes  of 
feeling  is  irony,  taking  on  protean  forms,  among  which  it  is 
convenient  to  distinguish  the  whimsical,  the  satirical,  and 
the  cynical.  The  Umbrella  (le  Parapluie),  or  Denis,  or 
Andrews  Illness  (le  Mai  d' Andre),  will  suggest  these  at 
their  best,  but  they  are  capable  of  descending  easily  to  the 
vulgarities  of  the  smoking-room  through  such  dubious  tales 
as  Decorated  (Decor^)  or  Qa  Ira  to  the  far  from  dubious 
Bolt  (le  Verrou).  Occasionally,  as  in  In  the  Woods  (Aux 
bois),  or  Regrets,  this  group  verges  on  the  preceding,  but 
there  is  always  here  a  morbid  pessimism,  a  contempt  of 
human  nature,  that  was  absent  from  the  former  group.  The 
stories  of  this  type  are  distributed  about  equally  through  the 
decade  of  Maupassant's  activity,  and  amount  to  about  a 
seventh  of  his  entire  production. 

This  irony  passes  easily  into  satire,  bitter,  as  in  Tlie  Heri- 


Guy  de  Maupassant  359 

tage  or  Abandoned  (I'Abandonn^),  recklessly  contemptuous 
of  social  conventions  in  hnprudence  or  The  Picnic  (la 
Partie  de  campagne),  or  mocking  them  with  a  sardonic 
smile  in  Suet-Ball  (Boule  de  suif),  Tellier  House  (la 
Maison  Tellier),  and  The  Unblessed  Feast  (Pain  maudit),  or 
with  rollicking  humour,  as  in  The  Rondoli  Sisters  (which, 
by  the  way,  was  founded  on  the  personal  experience  of  a 
novelist  whose  work  we  have  still  to  consider),  or  with 
Rabelaisian  gaiety  in  Madame  Luneau's  Lawsuit  (le  Cas  de 
Mme.  Luneau),  or  with  what  we  must  call  cynical  immor- 
ality in  Joseph  and  Saved  (Sauv^e),  or  with  socialistic  sym- 
pathies in  The  Vagabond,  or  with  cynical  lack  of  patriotism 
in  A  Coup  d^Etat,  or  with  sad  discouragement  mHautotpere 
eifils  and  in  the  longest  and  one  of  the  most  exquisite  of  all 
the  stories,  Yvette.  This  group  counts  rather  more  than  a 
seventh  of  the  whole,  with  more  masterpieces  than  any 
other,  and  they  are  distributed  quite  evenly  through  the 
decade. 

We  come  now  to  a  long  series  of  tales  intended  to  illus- 
trate the  almost  incredible  egoism  and  miserly  meanness  of 
the  French,  especially  the  Norman  peasant,  or  even  of  the 
bourgeoisie.  These  stories  are  so  painful  in  their  sordid- 
ness  that  it  may  suffice  to  name  ///  the  Fields  (Aux  champs) 
or  At  Sea  (En  mer) ,  Reveillo7i  or  Uncle  Julius  to  sug- 
gest the  tone.  But  this  sordidness  readily  passes  into 
brutality  or  wanton  cruelty,  as  in  such  unforgetable  pieces 
of  detestable  art  as  The  Devil  (le  Diable)  or  Coco  or 
Madame  Lefebvre  or  The  Donkey  (I'Ane).  It  finds  its 
most  thoughtful  and  cynical  expression  in  Pere  Amable  and 
The  Little  Cask  (le  Petit  fut),  its  most  pathetic  in  A 
Farmer's  Girl  (une  Fille  de  ferme),  and  its  crudest  in  The 
Sabots  and  the  Algerian  Mahommed-Fripouilk, 


360      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

Closely  allied  to  these  tales,  which  count  perhaps  a  fifth 
of  the  whole,  are  the  stories  of  the  Prussian  war,  mainly,  as 
is  natural,  in  the  earlier  volumes.  In  The  Prisoners  (les 
Prisonniers)  and  Twelfth-Night  (les  Rois)  humour  tempers 
horror,  but  in  Mother  Sauvage  (la  Mere  Sauvage)  and 
Saint- Antoine  the  beast  in  man  seems  utterly  unchained. 
There  is  a  mordant  irony  and  scepticism  of  French  patriot- 
ism in  Walter  Schnaffs,  which  is  surprising  when  one  con- 
siders the  really  noble  note  struck  in  Two  Friends  (Deux 
amis).  But  the  great  story  of  this  group  is  unquestionably 
Mile.  Fiji,  whose  heroine,  Pvachel,  the  courtesan  redeemed 
by  patriotism,  is  a  decidedly  agreeable  variation  on  The 
Lady  with  the  Caviellias. 

We  come  now  to  that  portion  of  Maupassant's  fiction  that 
is  at  once  most  painful  and  most  interesting,  the  forty  or 
more  stories  in  which  pessimism  reaches  an  intensity  that 
was  the  foreboding  of  haunting  nightmares,  by  which 
his  mind  was  gradually  shrouded  in  madness,  to  fiiid  re- 
lease only  in  death.  Already  in  Madame  Paul  (la  Femme 
de  Paul),  in  his  first  volume,  he  had  exhibited  sensualism 
leading  to  fatalistic  despair  and  self-destruction,  and  the 
second  volume,  Miss  Fiji  contains  in  Mad?  (Fou?)  distinct 
premonitions  of  the  author's  insanity.  There  is  nothing 
else  of  the  kind  in  these  books,  however,  and  neither  A  Son 
(un  Fils)  nor  Fear  (la  Peur)  of  the  next  are  as  morbid. 
Indeed,  save  for  the  Dantesque  Promenade  {in  la  Main 
gauche,  1884),  it  is  not  until  we  come  to  his  sixth  collec- 
tion of  tales  {Monsieur  Parent,  1884)  that  the  fatalistic 
tone  becomes  strongly  marked,  in  The  Pin  (I'Epingle)  and 
Little  Soldier  (Petit  Soldat),  while  there  is  distinct  trace  of 
mental  alienation  in  Solitude  and  in  A  Maniac  (un  Fou). 
Then  with  each  succeeding  volume  the  number  of  such  tales 


Guy  de  Maupassant  361 

increases.  Deepening  gloom,  preoccupation  with  death, 
Satanism,  and  ghostly  hallucination  are  all  to  be  found  in 
Yvette  and  most  of  them  in  Miss  Harriety  and  from  The 
Rondoli  Sisters ^  of  1886,  nausea  at  the  monotony  of  life  and 
haunting  terror  of  death  becomes  periodic  in  its  recurrence, 
so  that  we  pass  in  chronological  ascension  from  He  (Lui) 
to  Little  Roque  (la  Petite  Roque) ,  then  through  the  terrible 
and  ghastly  Horla  to  the  obvious  insanity  of  Who  Knows  ? 
(Qui  Salt?),  both  in  collections  of  tales  to  which  they  give 
the  dominant  note. 

To  all  these  tales  Maupassant  brings  the  same  careful 
elaboration,  for  in  them  all  he  was  desperately  seeking  a 
means  of  emancipation  from  self,  though  it  is  probable  that 
his  writing  hastened  the  progress  of  the  disease  to  which 
he  finally  succumbed.  A  sensuality  so  profound,  so  earnest 
and  complete  as  that  of  this  pupil  of  Flaubert  impHed  the 
dissolution  of  moral  faith,  the  paralysis  of  will.  Many  have 
written  in  this  spirit,  but  few  have  also  lived  in  it.  None 
may  deny  the  ideal  with  impunity.  Others  have  toyed 
with  pessimism,  Maupassant  was  its  victim. 


CHAPTER  XVII 

THE  GENERATION  OF  THE  SECOND  EMPIRE 

IT  is  curious  to  note  that  of  the  writers  whom  we  may 
classify  as  belonging  by  birth  to  the  Second  Empire, 
the  two  most  distinguished,  Maupassant  and  Loti,  were  born, 
as  were  Gyp  and  Rabusson,  before  the  coup  d'etat  and 
Bourget  very  shortly  after,  while  the  remaining  eighteen 
years  of  the  empire  count  but  seven  names  worthy  of 
mention  as  novelists,  and  of  these  none  of  primary  im- 
portance, unless  perhaps  we  accept  for  performance  the 
promise  of  Margueritte. 

Of  all  these,  Maupassant  is  far  the  greatest  genius,  but 
Pierre  Loti  has  qualities  of  his  own  that  place  him  much 
above  the  commonplace,  though  aside  from  the  main  line 
of  novelistic  development.  This  recently  retired  naval 
lieutenant,  whose  real  name  is  Pierre  Viaud,  was  born  in 
the  seaport  of  Rochelle,  of  Huguenot  ancestry,  entered  the 
marine  service  in  1867  when  but  seventeen,  and  in  twelve 
years'  cruising  had  absorbed  into  his  receptive  nature  so 
much  of  the  inner  spirit  of  exotic  life  that  he  was  able  with 
his  very  first  venture  to  strike  a  chord  that  charmed  the 
cultured  public  and  gave  him  a  place  unchallenged  and 
apart  in  his  generation.  The  two  elements  of  this  unique 
chord  were  his  power  of  description  and  his  vague  melan- 
choly. Both  were  of  peculiar  quality.  He  had  an  ex- 
quisitely  keen    observation,   but   it    is   no    photographic 


The  Generation  of  the  Second  Empire   363 

description  of  strange  horizons  that  gives  charm  to  the 
Constantinople  of  his  Aziyade  (1879),  the  Tahiti  of  his 
Marriage  of  Loti  (1880),  the  Senegal  of  his  SpahVs  Ro- 
mance (1881),  the  Brittany  and  the  ocean  of  My  Brother 
Ives  (1883),  the  fishing  smacks  and  northern  seas  of  The 
Iceland  Fisherman  (1886),  the  Algeria  of  The  Kasbah 
(1884),  the  Japan  of  Madame  Chtjsantheme  (1887),  or 
to  the  later  impressions  of  Morocco  (1890),  the  Syrian 
Desert  (1894),  and  Galilee  (1895),  or  to  the  Basque 
coxmixy  oi  Ramuntcho  (1897).  The  unique  touch  lies  in 
this,  that  to  every  landscape  he  gives  an  individuality  and 
as  it  were  a  soul.  Environment  seems  not  only  to  explain 
but  to  condition  character.  It  casts  its  spell  around  us 
and  gives  in  each  case  its  own  refraction  to  our  ethics  of 
civilisation.  And  this  fascination  is  increased  and  per- 
petuated by  the  witchery  of  his  vague  melancholy,  suggest- 
ing Chateaubriand  and  his  Ren6,  but  more  sincere,  more 
frank  and  honest  in  its  self-revelation.  There  are  times 
when,  as  in  The  Story  of  a  Child  (le  Roman  d'un  enfant, 
1890),  he  seems  almost  eager  to  show  us  all  the  steps  by 
which  his  soul  was  brought  out  of  the  Protestant  severity 
of  his  infancy,  through  the  beauty  of  Catholic  ritual  and 
the  soothing  of  Catholic  dogma,  to  the  cold  heights  of 
pessimistic  doubt,  to  *'  the  horrible  consciousness  of  the 
vanity  of  vanities  and  the  dust  of  dusts."  So  his  stories 
tend  more  and  more  to  become  "  log-books  of  sentiments 
and  feelings  "  interpenetrated  with  a  hate  of  hyper-culture 
and  a  longing  for  simplicity.  "Who  will  save  us,"  he  some- 
where exclaims,  <'from  modern  sham,  false  luxury,  uni- 
formity, and  imbeciles?" 

Thus  it  happens  that  he  is  drawn  naturally  to  the  primi- 
tive  races.      He  is   not  cosmopoUtan,   but   exotic.     The 


364      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

interaction  of  races  would  but  tend,  he  thinks,  to  recipro- 
cal deformation.  He  is  a  decadent  yet  a  primitive,  and  as 
the  natural  element  of  primitive  natures  is  the  picturesque, 
he  is  far  more  artist  than  psychologist,  drawn  to  the  prim- 
itive not  alone  in  landscape  but  in  character,  either  to 
the  stubborn,  resisting  African  nature  and  barbarism  or  to 
the  immobilized  Far-East,  whose  wars  remind  him  of  the 
days  of  Jengiz  and  Attila. 

In  his  earlier  books  it  is  primitive  types  of  love  that 
interest  him :  Aziyad^,  in  the  tragic  fatality  of  her  devour- 
ing passion ;  Rarahu,  that  sweetest  of  moral  infants  cradled 
in  a  sensuous  Eden;  or  the  fierce  sensualist  Fatou-gaye; 
or  the  enigmatic  and  naively  immoral  Madame  Chrysan- 
th^me  ;  or  Gaud,  the  pathetic  betrothed  of  the  Iceland  fish- 
erman. Gradually,  however,  love  yields  in  his  mind  the 
first  place  to  death.  A  shrinking  from  the  thought  of  anni- 
hilation had  possessed  him  from  childhood,  as  we  may  see 
from  The  Story  of  a  Child,  The  more  he  loves,  the  more 
he  dreads  in  his  discouraged  pessimism;  in  the  Book  oj 
Pity  and  Death  (189 1 )  his  feelings  escape  in  a  cry  of  intense 
though  subdued  sadness,  and  at  last  in  Faces  and  Tilings 
that  Pass  (Figures  et  choses  qui  passent,  1897)  he  has 
reached  the  point  where  "  the  need  of  struggling  against 
death  is  the  only  immaterial  reason  that  one  has  for 
writing,"  and  love  is  banished  not  only  from  his  Annam, 
but  from  his  whole  mental  horizon.  Resignation,  pity, 
intensity  of  feeling  and  of  sympathy  are  the  permanent 
moral  characteristics  of  his  work. 

All  this  work  bears  in  it  an  element  of  morbidity,  of 
hyperesthesia,  that  makes  every  sensation  a  pain,  vague 
and  far  off  perhaps,  yet  never  absent.  There  is  perver- 
sity even  in  his  exotic  affections,  never  a  union  of  hearts. 


The  Generation  of  the  Second  Empire   365 

as  how  should  there  be  ?  For  Loti  has  brought  with  him 
from  our  Western  world  not  only  the  burden  but  the  dignity 
of  a  hfe  of  struggle  with  nature  and  her  forces.  There 
can  be  for  him  no  peace  in  Fatou-gaye's  bestiality,  in 
Madame  Chrysanth^me's  toying  with  existence,  nor  even 
in  the  dreamful  ease  of  Rarahu.  It  is  as  though  life  and 
nature  brought  to  him  only  suggestions  of  sadness,  as 
though  a  rational,  normal  happiness  were  contrary  to  some 
law  of  his  nature,  which  in  An  Old  Man  (un  Vieux,  1893) 
and  Sailor  (Matelot,  1893)  utters  itself  in  tones  as  plain- 
tive and  penetrating  as  the  sighing  notes  of  a  violin. 

For  the  instrument  on  which  he  plays  contributes  essen- 
tially to  the  charm  of  his  art.  He  has  made  prose  the 
vehicle  of  sensations  that  one  might  have  thought  belonged 
solely  to  music,  surpassing  in  this  the  efforts  of  Flaubert 
and  the  Goncourts.  He  has,  in  Bruneti^re's  words,  "a 
singular  faculty  of  impregnating  the  senses  with  the  form, 
colour,  even  the  very  odour  of  things,"  and  thus  gives  to  his 
descriptions  a  vivid  intensity  attained  by  none  other  in 
modern  France.  And  he  attains  this  by  marvellously  simple 
means,  by  a  direct  style  and  a  small  vocabulary  with  never  a 
sense  of  effort  or  of  strain.  Language  to  him  is  an  instru- 
ment on  which  he  plays  at  will.  He  can  make  it  convey 
the  most  precise  impression  beneath  which  shall  play  the 
most  dimly  delicate  suggestion,  attained  perhaps  by  some 
unfamiliar  combination  of  the  familiar.  His  is  an  impression- 
ism whose  virtuosity  lies  in  its  simplicity ;  it  produces  on 
the  reader  a  sort  of  hallucination,  less  of  a  land  than  of  a 
life,  a  mode  of  thought  and  sensation  unlike  any  we  have 
known.  We  do  not  so  much  see  the  Tahiti  of  the  Mar- 
riage  of  Loti  as  feel  its  languor  of  gratified  desires  and  the 
beneficence  of  its  exuberant  nature,  "  where  the  abundance 


366      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

and  continuity  of  agreeable  sensations  cradles  you  in  an 
endless  dream."  We  carry  away  no  defined  pictures,  yet 
we  have  a  very  intense  impression.  And  so  to  the  last  in 
Ramuntcho  and  in  Faces  and  Things  that  Pass  we  feel, 
much  more  than  we  see,  the  smugglers'  perils  and  the  con- 
vent's peace  and  the  corpse-strewn  fields  of  Annam.  The 
critic  who  would  define  or  describe  Loti's  qualities  or  his 
charm  is  sure  to  find  himself  at  last,  like  Lemaitre,  so  much 
the  more  incapable  of  rising  beyond  the  sphere  of  feeling, 
as  he  yields  himself  willing  captive  to  the  charm  of  this 
mind,  perhaps  the  most  delicate  sensation -machine  that  we 
shall  ever  meet.  He  gives  us  a  pleasure  too  great  and 
too  acute,  too  penetrating  that  we  should  judge  him,  or 
say  too  confidently  that  his  charm  is  that  of  decadence,  or 
that  there  is  in  him,  as  he  himself  has  said,  citing  lines 
from  Hugo's  Ondines^  something  both  of  — 

"  The  sky  that  paints  the  scarcely  creeping  seas, 
And  bottom  ooze,  in  dark,  dull,  dread  repose.'* 

Loti  had  no  immediate  literary  ancestor,  indeed  except 
in  a  very  superficial  way  he  has  no  literary  ancestor  at  all 
in  France,  and  his  art  has  found  no  imitators  or  pupils 
worthy  of  the  name.  To  return  to  the  normal  categories 
of  fiction,  we  shall  find  the  feuilletonists  best  represented, 
perhaps,  by  Maizeroy,  but  tending  to  degenerate  into  witty 
and  frivolous  conteurs^  of  whom  Gyp  is  surely  queen,  and 
Lavedan  perhaps  her  prime  minister.  His  short  stories,  for 
instance  The  Upper  Ten  (la  Haute),  have  a  remarkable  self- 
restraint  of  style  that  exactly  befits  his  cynical  morgue  and 
this  phosphorescent  reflection  of  aristocratic  degeneracy. 
They  sparkle  with  dry  wit,  with  a  delicate  yet  mordant 
irony.     There  is  a  savour  of  the  old  Gallic  salt  in  Lavedan's 


The  Generation  of  the  Second  Empire  367 

humour,  but  in  the  main  he  typifies  those  disintegrating 
forces  in  Hterature  and  society  that  found  their  philosophic 
expression  in  the  aristocratic  pessimism  of  Renan. 

Gyp  is,  perhaps,  even  more  characteristic  of  this  deli- 
quescent "  end-of-the-century  "  society.  Herself  an  aristo- 
crat and  great-grandniece  of  the  revolutionary  Mirabeau, 
her  books  are  the  faithful  mirror  of  the  society  in  which 
she  moves,  the  society  of  Feuillet's  novels  a  generation 
further  advanced  in  light-hearted  insouciance,  malicious 
idleness,  and  that  cynical  irreverence  that  the  French  call 
blagucy  and  that  seems  quite  without  ethical  or  artistic  sin- 
cerity. It  is  literary  absinthe,  a  charming  poison,  a  "  flower 
of  evil,"  fit  emblem  of  a  social  order  that  has  outlived  its 
usefulness,  whose  luxury  is  ever  merging  in  corruption. 
Characteristic  of  her  very  numerous  volumes  are  Petit  Bob 
(1882),  Marriage  (Autour  du  Mariage,  1883),  and  Mile, 
Loulou  (1888).  She  published  forty  others  in  the  space 
of  thirteen  years. 

Dealing  by  preference  with  the  same  class  and  at  first  in 
a  spirit  hardly  more  noble,  is  Paul  Bourget,  the  son  of  a 
professor,  who  began  Hfe  as  a  journalist  and  in  1883  won 
notice  by  a  volume  of  critical  essays  in  which  he  seemed  to 
take  himself  so  seriously  that  he  induced  others  to  take 
him  so.  He  is  the  self-proclaimed  herald  of  a  new  school 
in  fiction,  the  psychologists,  who  undertook  to  analyse  the 
complicated  sensations  of  those  who  could  afford  to  have 
them,  and  so  delighted  both  them  and  those  who  aspired  to 
be  received  in  their  charmed  circle.  "  You  cannot  make 
psychology  easy  reading,"  said  Cardinal  Newman,  and  the 
masquerade  of  science,  falsely  so  called,  that  Bourget 
obtrudes  in  his  narratives  is  tedious  reading  for  healthy 
minds.     It  has  been  happily  described  as  *'  a  seductive  if 


368      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

somewhat  sickly  product  of  the  hot-house  of  an  outworn 
civilisation,"  for  it  is  in  no  sense  a  plant  that  has  its  roots 
deep  in  the  national  soil,  while  in  the  author  himself  there 
has  still  remained  a  little  of  what  Augier  called  "  the  melan- 
choly pig." 

He  brought  to  his  fiction  a  studious  mind,  an  analytic 
disposition,  reflective  rather  than  creative,  supple  rather 
than  strong,  subtle  rather  than  profound,  and  somewhat 
morbidly  interested  in  the  mysteries  of  moral  life.  His 
style  was  like  his  mind,  suave,  graceful,  elegant,  but  ex- 
tremely uneven,  now  simple  as  M^rim^e,  now  mannered  as 
Marivaux,  careless  to  the  verge  of  a  dandified  solecism,  but 
capable  of  rising  on  due  occasion  to  a  terse  and  nervous 
concision.  He  describes  himself  as  a  moralist  of  the  deca- 
dence, a  moralist  not  a  reformer.  The  world  to  him  was 
out  of  joint,  introspective,  analytic,  lustful,  faithless,  shallow, 
and  dilettant.  It  was  as  though  his  intellect  and  moral 
fibre  had  been  blighted  by  the  upas  shadow  of  Renan's 
scepticism.  His  diagnosis  of  moral  anemia  might  be  bril- 
liant, but  he  had  no  tonic  remedy.  Such  was  the  Bourget 
of  the  EssaySy  in  which  he  had  sought  to  gather  materials  for 
the  historian  of  the  moral  life  of  contemporary  France,  of 
which  the  dominant  note  seemed  to  him  "  the  pessimism  in 
the  soul  of  contemporary  youth." 

Thus  disposed  and  thus  qualified,  Bourget  published  in 
1884  The  Irreparable,  possibly  the  most  pretentiously 
analytic  and  perversely  morbid  of  his  works,  whose  hero 
is  a  nasty  Valmont,  borrowed  from  Laclos,  and  the  heroine 
a  person  incapable  of  either  enjoying  or  bestowing  hap- 
piness, who  shoots  herself  at  the  close,  as  she  sensibly 
remarks,  "  for  nothing."  The  psychology  of  the  tale  is  as 
unnatural  as  it  is  laboured,  and  its  chief  merit  is  its  brevity. 


The  Generation  of  the  Second  Empire  369 

It  came,  however,  at  an  opportune  moment,  just  as  the  class 
to  which  he  appealed  were  beginning  to  turn  from  natural- 
ism and  to  seek  a  new  shibboleth.  The  people  that  he 
painted  here,  and  to  whom  he  continued  to  appeal  for  the 
next  ten  years,  are  not  typically  French  at  all,  but  a  narrow 
segment  of  society  that  by  inoculation  with  Jewish  and 
cosmopolitan  ideals  has  become  denationalised.  His 
scene  shifts  easily  from  Paris  to  England  or  to  Italy,  and 
indeed  his  characters  are  so  utterly  preoccupied  with  them- 
selves that  they  seem  as  much  at  home  in  one  country  as 
another. 

The  morbid  futility  of  The  Irreparable  pervades  A  Cruel 
Enigma  (Cruelle  ^nigme,  1885).  The  "enigma,"  is  the 
perplexity  of  Herbert,  whose  love  could  not  redeem  a  vicious 
mistress,  on  the  discovery  of  which  he  "  made  an  irremedi- 
able shipwreck  of  his  soul,"  being  a  victim  of  idealistic 
anxiety,  after  the  Ibsen-Tolstoi  manner,  for  whom  one  feels 
more  contempt  than  sympathy. 

A  Lover's  Crime  (Crime  d'amour,  1886),  which  a 
French  critic  says  should  be  named  "  Died  for  Nothing," 
takes  us  into  a  hot- house  atmosphere  of  sensual  jealousy 
and  topsy-turvy  sentiment  about  the  "  supreme  beneficence 
of  pity  "  and  "  the  religion  of  human  suffering,"  whose  god 
is  the  familiar  unholy  trinity.  In  its  morbid  kind,  however, 
this  study  of  "states  of  soul"  is  stronger  than  anything 
Bourget  had  yet  done,  and  decidedly  superior  to  the  diagnosis 
of  a  similar  case  in  Second  Love  (Deuxieme  amour,  1884). 
Andri  Cornells  followed  in  1887  and  closes  the  first  period 
of  Bourget's  development.  Up  to  this  point  he  subordi- 
nated inner  nature  to  environment,  let  his  personages  express 
their  natures  by  their  tastes  rather  than  by  their  feelings, 
and  left   us  exasperated  by  their  apparent  inconsistency, 

24 


3/0      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

while  wearying  us  with  details  of  luxury  of  upholstery  and 
bric-a-brac,  of  silk  stockings  wonderful  in  their  variety  of 
weave  and  shade,  and  of  spherical  geometry  applied  to  a 
corsage.  He  has  never  since  repeated  his  former  errors  in 
this  regard,  and  he  more  than  once  allows  his  spokesman, 
Claude  Larcher,  to  mock  his  earlier  self  in  The  Psychology 
of  Modern  Love. 

W\\h  Lies  (Mensonges,  1889)  Bourget  seems  to  attain  a 
clearer  vision  and  stronger  grasp  of  character,  yet  here,  too, 
there  is  far  too  much  patho- psycho- physiology,  and  we 
feel  some  debt  of  gratitude  to  the  faithless  Collette  that  she 
brought  the  putative  author  of  The  Psychology  of  Modern 
Love  to  an  early  grave.  But  while  in  this  novel  the  men 
are  little  more  than  playthings,  the  women  have  a  strong 
though  disagreeable  individuality.  Collette  is  less  frank,  less 
good-humoured  than  Zola's  Nana,  her  social  sister.  **  There 
was  a  cruelty  in  her  greenish  eyes,  in  the  curl  of  her  lip, 
and  a  sort  of  hatred.  .  .  .  She  loved  even  while  she  de- 
ceived, tortured,  and  humiliated."  Yet  she  is  as  gracious 
as  she  is  malicious  and  perverse.  Higher  in  the  mental, 
lower  in  the  moral  scale  than  Nana,  she  drags  her  lover 
relentlessly  down,  and  in  The  Psychology  of  Modern  Love 
you  may  see  him  sink  out  of  sight  if  you  will.  And  beside 
her  is  Mme.  Moraines,  the  society  lady,  with  a  Madonna 
face  and  a  coquettish  rosary  of  lies  always  at  command ;  as 
perfectly  corrupted  as  she  could  be,  but  quite  unconscious 
of  the  utter  baseness  into  which  she  had  insensibly  drifted. 
"A  complicated  sort  of  animal,"  says  Larcher,  to  whom 
Abb^  Taconet,  the  still  small  voice  of  common- sense  in  this 
psychological  wilderness,  replies  :  "  Comi^licated  !  She  is 
just  a  wretch  who  lives  at  the  mercy  of  her  sensations.  All 
that  —  it's  just  dirt."     We  breathe  freer  for  the  word,  but 


The  Generation  of  the  Second  Empire  371 

the  moral  triumph  of  the  book  is  with  cynical  selfishness. 
There  is  here  something  of  the  Mephistophelian  spirit,  a 
false  note  of  flippant  cynicism  which  is  absent  from  the 
later  novels. 

With  The  Disciple^  also  of  1889,  Bourget  joins  to  his 
reaction  from  naturalism  in  fiction  a  reaction  from  mate- 
rialism in  morals,  allying  himself  to  some  extent  with  the 
neo-CathoHc  movement,  and  in  a  preface  making  a  formal 
attack  on  the  scientific  spirit  and  the  philosophy  of  Taine, 
which  he  thinks,  or  affects  to  think,  dangerous  to  the  youth 
of  France,  whom  he  exhorts  to  be  neither  brutal  pessimists 
nor  disdainful  sophists,  nor  yet  cynics,  who  in  pride  of  life 
juggle  with  ideas.  What  they  are  to  be  instead  he  does 
not  yet  say,  and  his  novel,  though  founded  on  fact,  is  in- 
deed a  minute  and  accurate  analysis,  but  a  morbid  and  un- 
interesting story,  too  dull  to  be  unhealthy,  disarmed  by  its 
own  tediousness.  And  the  same  may  be  said  of  the  ten 
Portraits  of  Women,  written  at  intervals  since  1884  and 
collected  this  same  year.  They  demand  great  effort  to 
follow  an  analysis  of  little  interest.  This  is  true  also  of 
WomarCs  Heart  (Coeur  de  femme,  1890),  which  is  simply 
an  experiment  in  dual  affection  of  a  lady  whose  affinity 
was  "  a  Casal  with  the  heart  of  a  Poyanne,"  and  who  sought 
refuge  from  her  self-tormenting  folly  in  a  convent,  which 
to  this  dilettant  neo-Catholic  represents  "the  alcohol  of 
romantic  femininity." 

Ten  Portraits  of  Men  (Nouveaux  pastels,  1891)  has  for 
its  chief  contents  A  Saint,  a  most  genuine  and  wholly  charm- 
ing story  of  an  old  monk  whose  other-worldliness  is  set 
off  by  the  ferocity  of  a  young  man's  precocious  ambition. 
Bourget's  touch  has  never  been  so  exquisite  as  here,  cer- 
tainly not  in  Cosmopolis  (1892),  that  "romance  of  inter- 


372      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

national  life,"  in  which  he  proclaims  his  adhesion  to  a 
kind  of  Catholicism  that  is  more  curious  than  Christian, 
and  savours  of  the  sensuous  mysticism  of  Huysmans.  Yet 
Cosmopolis  is  the  best  told  of  all  Bourget's  novels.  It  is 
less  morbidly  analytic,  a  study  of  races  rather  than  of  indi- 
viduals, of  French,  English,  American,  Polish,  Italian,  and 
Creole-plus-negro  traits,  which  in  Bourget's  theory  persist  in 
spite  of  environment,  and  are  certainly  drawn  with  great 
cleverness  and  insight,  and  share  in  an  action  of  unusual 
interest  and  life. 

It  is  strange  that  while  able  to  do  this  work  Bourget 
should  have  been  willing  to  write  The  Promised  Land 
(Terre  promise,  1892),  a  dreary  piece  of  psychic  vivi- 
section and  self-torture  that  could  interest  only  an  alienist, 
and  comes  to  a  most  lame  conclusion.  Yet  in  this  painful 
narrative  are  imbedded  some  admirable  •  descriptions  of 
scenes  on  the  Riviera,  and  some  traits  of  child  life  that 
are  really  charming.  The  novel  marks,  however,  the 
beginning  of  Bourget's  decline.  He  has  never  since 
attained  the  level  of  Lies,  A  Saint,  and  Cosmopolis,  A 
Scruple  is  an  artistic  study  of  a  subject  quite  unworthy  of 
art,  and  the  coarse  Tragic  Idyll,  with  its  moral  inanity  and 
complacent  pretence  at  rehgion,  shows  a  still  further  de- 
scent toward  moral  nullity  and  senile  cynicism,  from  which 
New  Begin7iings  (Recommencements,  1897)  and  Lady  ^ 
Travellers  (Voyageuses,  1897)  show  no  disposition  to 
rise,  —  and  here  therefore  we  will  leave  him. 

The  transitory  vogue  and  talented  snobbery  of  Bourget 
naturally  suggested  imitation.  Older  men,  such  as  Ricard 
and  "  J-H.  Rosny,"  set  their  sails  to  the  new  breeze,  and 
among  the  younger  devotees  of  literary  dandyism  Rabusson 
has  at  least  a  curious  interest  for  the  diligence  with  which 


The  Generation  of  the  Second  Empire  373 

he  treats  the  subjects  of  Feuillet  with  the  methods  of 
Bourget,  and  spices  the  ragout  with  Cr^billon  fils.  He 
has  pubUshed  more  than  a  score  of  novels,  of  which  perhaps 
the  best  is  The  Adventure  of  Mile,  de  Saint- Alais  (1885). 
His  most  recent  work,  notably  the  Chimeras  of  Mark 
Lepraistre  (1898),  is  beneath  serious  criticism.  And  one 
is  tempted  to  say  the  same  for  the  entire  work  of  Paul 
Hervieu,  who  satirizes  society  in  a  dozen  novels  with  what 
a  decadent  critic  calls  '^  happy  cruelty,"  that  is,  with  per- 
verse keenness  and  fundamental  untruthfulness,  of  which 
The  Armature  (1897),  is  a  recent  and  sufficient  example. 

A  more  subtly  delicate  genius  is  that  of  the  Swiss  Rod,  a 
critic  of  much  sanity,  whose  fiction  up  to  1890  is  distinctly 
naturalistic  in  tone,  but  passes  in  The  Sacrifice  (1892) 
under  the  influence  of  Russian  mysticism,  and  maintains 
a  strain  of  exquisite  melancholy  in  Michel  Tessier  (1894), 
and  The  White  Cliffs  (les  Rochers  blancs,  1895),  all  studies 
of  misunderstood  feminine  virtue  struggling  against  narrow 
or  brutal  virility,  and  attaining  the  misery  that,  according  to 
Rod,  is  the  normal  reward  of  virtue  on  earth.  Very  recently 
he  seems  to  have  shaken  off  this  nightmare,  and  in  Above 
(La-haut,  1897)  has  given  us  a  fine  picture  of  Alpine  life, 
and  an  effective  contrast  of  petty  interests  and  vast  environ- 
ment. He  will  always  be  analytic,  but  it  is  as  though  the 
Alpine  air  were  clearing  his  brain  from  the  taint  of  Bourget's 
dilettantism. 

A  greater  critic,  but  a  much  less  successful  novelist  than 
Rod,  is  Jules  Lemaitre,  of  whose  Serenus  (1886)  it  has  been 
said  that  the  hero  is  a  saint  whose  tombstone  is  his  great- 
est virtue.  His  Ten  Tales  (1889)  are  projections  of  the 
critic's  spirit  into  the  realm  of  imagination,  and  The  Kings 
(les  Rois,  1893)  is  a  modernized  Kings  in  Exile  freshened 


374      ^  Century  of  French  Fiction 

up  with  dashes  of  recent  scandal,  and  spiced  with  Luise 
Michel  and  Prince  Krapotkine. 

Another  novelist,  to  be  named  less  for  performance  than 
for  hereditary  claim  to  genius,  is  L^on  Daudet,  son  of  the 
great  novelist,  and  himself  author  of  several  novels  re- 
markable for  vigour  and  action,  but  bizarre  in  conception 
and  uncertain  in  ethics.  The  most  striking  of  them  is 
probably  The  Ghouls  (les  Morticoles,  1894),  an  attack  on 
experimental  medicine  with  which  his  father,  to  judge  from 
his  posthumous  At  the  Salpetriere,  would  have  sympathised. 
Thinking  with  Rabelais  that  science  without  conscience  is 
the  ruin  of  the  soul,  he  abhors  Renan  and  all  his  works. 
Curious,  too,  is  the  extreme  individualism  and  the  Utopian 
or  rather  anarchistic  politics  of  The  Black  Star  (I'Astre  noir, 

1893). 

This  plea  for  egoism  leads  us  naturally  to  the  self-pro- 
claimed apostle  of  that  creed,  Maurice  Barres,  whose 
first  book  appeared  under  the  sponsorship  of  Bourget, 
on  whom  he  has  bestowed  all  flattery  but  that  of  imitation. 
For  the  early  volumes  of  Barres,  Under  the  Eye  of  the 
Barbarians  (Sous  I'oeil  des  barbares,  1888),  Berenice's 
Garden  (le  Jardin  de  B^r^nice,  1891),  2iTidi  A  Free  Man 
(un  Homme  libre,  1889),  were  so  uneven  in  style  and 
so  obscure  in  substance  that  he  affixed  to  the  last  of 
them  an  essay  of  fifty-six  pages  to  explain  his  explanation 
of  egoism  as  a  working  rule  of  life.  And  yet  the  observer 
of  the  signs  of  the  times  in  letters  will  note  in  Barres 
one  of  the  first  conscious  efforts  in  the  generation  that  felt 
most  strongly  the  influence  of  Renan  to  throw  off  that 
moral  lethargy  without  returning  to  the  outworn  deter- 
minism of  Taine  or  to  the  naturalism  of  Zola.  , 

For  if  Barres  is  to  be  taken  at  all  he  must  be  taken  serf- 


The  Generation  of  the  Second  Empire  375 

ously.  The  nickname  Mademoiselle  Renan  given  him  by 
a  Parisian  jester  is  both  shallow  and  false.  Nor  need  we 
follow  the  critics  in  setting  persistently  the  mark  of  irony  on 
all  his  doings,  literary  or  political.  Perverse  and  over-subtle 
in  his  idealism  he  has  ever  been,  but  there  is  no  fear  that 
we  shall  be  our  own  dupes  if  we  hold  him  serious  and 
earnest  always.  His  early  novels  are  hard  reading.  They 
have  never  been  widely  read,  but  they  render  better  than 
anything  else  the  state  of  soul  of  a  large  class  of  over-civil- 
ised French  youth,  repelled  alike  by  the  altruism  of  the 
neo-Catholics  and  by  what  they  are  pleased  to  call  the 
bankruptcy  of  science,  that  can  but  grope  where  they  would 
have  it  leap  like  Euphorion  to  meet  Euphorion's  fate. 

Barres's  first  three  books  are  metaphysical  autobiog- 
raphy. He  compares  them  himself  to  Goethe's  Truth  and 
Fiction,  "All  in  them  is  true,  nothing  exact;"  "They  are 
not  psychology,  but  spiritual  memoirs,"  he  explains.  Their 
purpose  is  to  define  the  ego,  to  justify  its  cult,  to  show  how 
it  must  be  daily  recreated  and  directed  in  harmony  with  the 
universe.  Not  as  though  this  cult  were  a  finality ;  "  Nega- 
tion has  not  yet  finished  its  task,"  but  it  is  "  the  best  wait- 
ing-ground." "  Why  should  not  a  generation  disgusted 
with  much,  perhaps  with  everything  except  playing  with 
ideas,  try  metaphysical  romance  ?  "  So  in  his  first  volume  he 
describes  "  the  awakening  of  a  youth  to  conscious  life,  first 
among  books,  then  among  urban  brutalities."  The  second 
recounts  the  experiments  of  the  hero  Philippe,  who  by 
striving  always  to  be  ardent  yet  clear-sighted  grows  to  be  "  a 
free  man,"  and  so  first  becomes  ready  for  action.  "  It  is 
we  who  create  the  universe.  This  is  the  truth  that  impreg- 
nates each  page  of  this  little  work.  .  .  .  Let  each  develop 
his  own  ego,  and  humanity  will  be  a  beautiful  forest,  beauti- 


376      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

ful  in  this,  that  all,  trees,  plants,  and  animals,  develop  freely 
there,  grow  according  to  their  nature."  Thus  in  Barres 
fiction  becomes  the  handmaid  of  psychology,  with  whom  in 
Bourget  she  had  claimed  a  nominal  equality.  It  is  a  curi- 
ous witness  to  the  disorientation  of  an  old  civilisation,  in 
which  cynical  democracy  mocks  the  sensitive  delicacy  of 
the  over-refined,  that  a  considerable  number  of  young  tal- 
ents befuddle  their  brains  for  a  time  with  such  social  meta- 
physics before  clarifying  them  by  work,  which  is  the 
ultimate  though  somewhat  ironical  teaching  of  these 
volumes.  For  the  Spiritual  Exercises  of  Loyola  and  retire- 
ment in  a  Lorraine  hermitage  lead  to  the  conclusion  that 
the  pursuit  of  wealth  is  "  the  asylum  where  spirits  careful 
for  the  inner  Hfe  can  best  await"  some  organisation  to 
combat  the  suppression  of  the  ego ;  and  so  Barr^s's  hero 
applies  for  a  license  to  open  a  suburban  hippodrome. 

No  doubt  much  in  these  volumes  is  due  to  a  morbid 
desire  of  singularity  and  French  love  of  system.  When  he 
escaped  from  these  bonds,  Barres  showed  even  in  these 
early  novels  remarkable  power  of  irony,  directed  espe- 
cially against  Renan,  exquisite  feeling  and  sympathy  in 
the  pages  devoted  to  Hypatia,  and  beautiful  descriptions 
of  Lorraine  landscape.  We  are  constrained  often,  as  we 
read,  to  exclaim  with  his  Seneca,  "  Qualis  artifex  pereo  ! " 
What  an  artist,  and  yet  how  sure  of  perishing.  For  it  is 
the  spirit,  not  the  art,  that  quickens,  and  selfish  negation,  if 
it  endure  for  its  beauty,  endures  only  as  a  warning  that  the 
old  culture  is  out  of  touch  with  the  new  environment. 
Democracy  is  beginning  to  realise  itself  in  the  life  of  the 
people,  to  change  the  popular  character.  In  such  trans- 
formations those  who  cannot  go  with  the  current  find  con- 
solation  in   a   perverse    Pyrrhonism.      This    is    still    the 


The  Generation  of  the  Second  Empire   377 

position  of  The  Enemy  of  Law  (rEnnemi  des  lois,  1892), 
but  in  The  Uprooted  (les  D^racin^s,  1897)  the  genius  of 
Barr^s  has  worked  itself  out  of  this  aristocratic  dilettantism 
to  the  point  where  he  is  ready  to  write  "  the  romance  of 
national  energy,"  preaching  the  gospel  of  brotherhood  as 
earnestly  as  he  had  done  that  of  egoism,  seeing  at  last  that 
in  abstraction  and  logical  ideals  there  is  only  waste,  disillu- 
sion, and  disappointment ;  that  a  nation  is  made  by  its  tra- 
ditions, and  that  all  growth  is  development.  Thus  Barres 
offers  in  his  way  as  interesting  a  case  of  physic  development 
as  Huysmans,  and  as  significant. 

In  the  generation  of  the  sixties  there  are  many  men  of 
promise  whose  general  characteristic  is  eccentricity.  It  is 
still  too  early  to  characterise  the  talent  of  Ligaux,  of  Es- 
tauni^,  of  Brada,  or  of  many  others  who  may  achieve  dis- 
tinction. Two  only  have  done  so,  and  this  volume  may 
close  with  an  appreciation  of  the  work  of  Provost  and  of 
Margueritte. 

The  former  is  two  years  the  younger,  and  now  but 
thirty-six.  His  first  novel,  published  at  twenty-five,  2Vie 
Scorpion  (1887),  is  an  attempt  at  hereditary  psychology, 
an  analysis  of  the  fusion  in  a  child  of  a  woman's  religious 
monomania  with  the  sensualism  of  a  commercial  traveller. 
The  life  in  a  Jesuit  school,  from  which  the  book  gets  its 
name,  is  exceedingly  well  done  and  shows  the  influence  of 
Zola.  The  close  is  sensational,  but  few  novelists  have  en- 
tered the  lists  with  a  work  of  such  power  and  promise. 

In  a  preface  to  his  next  novel,  Chonchette  (1888), 
shrewdly  seeking  between  the  naturaUsts  and  the  psycholo- 
gists a  name  that  should  antagonise  neither.  Provost  posed 
as  the  originator  of  a  romantic  naturalism,  with  which  he 
sought   to   attract   those  weary  of  aristocratic  "states   of 


3/8      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

soul"  and  plebeian  states  of  life.  In  Chonchette  there  is 
less  crudity,  more  of  the  idyllic,  elegant,  mannered,  and 
even  sentimental,  and  the  same  might  be  said  of  Mademoi- 
selle Jauf  re  ^  though  there  is  here  a  luxuriant  freshness  of 
style  that  reminds  one  of  George  Sand  rather  than  of 
Marivaux.  The  purpose  of  the  book,  like  that  of  Feuillet's 
The  Dead  Wife  is  to  show  that  young  ladies  should  not 
have  a  scientific  education.  But  in  the  next  year,  in  a 
preface  to  Cousin  Laura  (1890),  he  ceased  to  pose  as  a 
moralist  and  claimed  for  the  moment  no  higher  aim  than  to 
amuse  the  public.  He  avowed  himself  here,  what  he  had 
always  been  at  heart,  a  keen  mocker  of  society,  an  amateur 
collector  of  the  distortions  of  love ;  and  he  illustrated  this 
position  excellently  by  his  next  story  The  Lover's  Co7ifes- 
sion  (1891),  a  piece  of  sentimental  romanticism  in  which 
the  hero's  ideals  of  womanhood  contradict  nature  so  radi- 
cally that  the  tortures  of  his  soul,  which  occupy  the  larger 
part  of  the  book,  can  but  lead  to  an  impotent  conclusion. 

This  book  was  followed  by  the  very  popular  Letters  of 
Wo7nen  (1892),  which  with  the  New  Letters  of  Women 
(1894),  and  the  Last  Letters  of  Women  (1897),  are  sup- 
posed to  be  written  by  ladies  and  to  deal  with  one  phase 
or  another  of  love.  These  tales  are  as  graceful  and  ingeni- 
ous as  those  of  Maupassant,  as  ironically  witty,  and  very 
much  more  indecent.  The  society  for  and  of  which  they 
are  written  appears  to  consist  solely  of  idle,  inconsequent, 
lustful,  and  wealthy  vagrants,  with  the  instincts  and  preoccu- 
pations of  a  cage  of  monkeys.  Occasionally  there  is  an- 
other strain,  but  the  dominant  note  is  of  a  sensual  or 
cynical  perversity,  illustrating  most  painfully  the  hardness 
that  underlies  the  superficial  sentiment  of  French  culture. 

A   Woman's  Autumn  (I'Automne  d'une  femuie,  1893) 


The  Generation  of  the  Second  Empire   379 

has  a  nobler  tone.  It  is  a  story  suggesting  Maupassant's 
Strong  as  Deaths  of  love  rising  imperious  in  a  woman  who 
can  no  longer  inspire  a  corresponding  passion,  and  is  fain 
at  last  to  give  to  fresher  beauty  the  man  she  loves,  who  is 
himself  a  sentimental  sensualist,  so  that  the  situation  sug- 
gests also  George  Sand's  Lucrezia  Floriani. 

Provost's  most  sensational  success  was  attained  by  The 
Demi-ViergeSf  of  1894,  a  study  of  maids  who  have  lost 
their  bloom  by  a  social  freedom  alleged  to  be  imported 
from  England  and  America,  and  who  in  Provost's  opinion 
tend  thus  to  become  morally  impure  in  spite  of  physical 
purity.  The  novel  is  a  sensational  appeal  to  a  narrow 
provincial  nationalism,  and  is  neither  creditable  nor  charac- 
teristic. It  is  hard  to  see  how  any  training  could  produce 
a  more  rotten  femininity  than  that  illustrated  by  the  aristo- 
cratic writers  of  his  Letters  of  Women,  and  the  picturesque 
interest  of  the  story  does  not  mask  the  careless  laxity  of  its 
psychology. 

In  his  interest  in  feminine  vice  or  folly  Provost  does  not 
forget  the  men  of  France.  The  peculiarly  discreditable 
bestiality  of  the  hero  of  TJie  Nazareth  Mill  (le  Moulin  de 
Nazareth,  1894)  makes  him  as  revolting  as  the  fate  of  his 
victim  is  pitiful.  We  can  but  trust  that  the  Frenchmen 
who  spy  through  keyholes  servants  at  their  toilet  are  no 
more  characteristic  of  their  country  than  "  naptha  queens  " 
from  Boston  who  send  their  immensely  wealthy  husbands  to 
German  universities  and  find  delight  in  the  society  of  such 
disgusting  little  beasts  as  Jacques  Ebel.  Provost  should 
let  America  alone.  He  returns  to  more  familiar  ground  in 
the  short  stories  of  Our  Country  (Notre  campagne),  which 
are  never  vulgar,  always  clever,  and  sometimes  pure. 

With    Tlie  Hidden    Garden    (le   Jardin   secret,   1897), 


380      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

Provost  takes  us,  almost  for  the  first  time,  to  the  middle 
class,  and  with  the  moral  of  Goethe's  Fellow-Sinners  tells 
the  strongest  and  noblest  story  that  he  has  yet  written.  A 
woman  discovers  that  she  has  linked  her  life  to  an  epilep- 
tic adulterer,  lapses  from  despair  to  rage  and  desire  for 
vengeance,  but  shrinks  from  divorce,  and,  gradually  recall- 
ing the  secrets  of  her  own  life,  sees  that  her  faults  balance 
her  husband's,  and  so  is  brought  to  a  tolerant  charity.  But 
the  interest  here  lies  less  in  the  story  than  in  the  light  it 
casts  on  the  nature  of  conventional  marriage,  both  on  its 
physical  and  psychic  side,  and  on  the  explanation  that  this 
affords  of  the  prominence  in  French  fiction  of  extra-marital 
love  and  its  seemingly  irresistible  crises. 

Regarding  Provost's  work  as  a  whole,  he  will  be  found 
most  nearly  allied  to  Maupassant,  less  profound,  less  pessi- 
mistic, less  cynical,  and  far  less  powerful  in  his  conceptions, 
but  almost  as  deft,  lucid,  compact,  swift,  and  unerring  in 
attaining  the  lesser  effects  that  he  essays. 

A  more  virile  spirit  than  any  whom  we  have  considered 
in  this  chapter,  one  in  whom  is  a  healthier  view  of  life,  a 
new,  profounder,  and  purified  realism,  and  the  best  promise 
of  the  immediate  future,  is  Paul  Margueritte,  whose  develop- 
ment from  All  Four  (Tousquatre,  1884)  to  The  Disaster  (le 
D^sastre,  1897)  is  as  interesting  as  that  of  Huysmans  dur-| 
ing  the  same  period,  and  far  more  inspiring  and  reassuring. 
Margueritte  was  always  serious  and  never  base,  but  his 
early  work  was  extremely,  almost  defiantly,  naturalistic, 
though  it  was  rather  the  naturalism  of  the  Goncourts  than 
of  Zola,  both  in  conception,  structure,  and  style.  In  All 
Four  he  seems  restless,  unquiet,  working  by  short,  sharp 
strokes,  as  nervously  anxious  as  the  Goncourts  to  "  pin  the 
adjective"   and  to  startle  by  a  crudity  of  expression  at 


The  Generation  of  the  Second  Empire  38 1 

which  you  feel  the  author  himself  shrinks,  for  all  his  deter- 
mination to  look  life  steadily  in  the  face,  even  in  its  most 
repulsive  details.  Yet  here  at  the  outset  there  is  a  ques- 
tioning conscience  and  a  moral  purpose,  obscured  and  per- 
verted as  it  may  seem.  He  feels  that  to  strip  vice  is  to 
shame  hypocrisy,  and  the  hypocrisy  that  most  irritates 
him  is  that  of  the  philistine  bourgeois  and  the  intriguing 
man  of  letters.  There  is  in  AU  Four  a  morbid  tendency  to 
introspective  revery  and  to  pessimistic  fatalism,  which  may 
be  traced  in  all  his  work  for  the  next  six  years ;  but  even  in 
his  next  novel.  The  Posthumous  Confession  (la  Confession 
posthume,  1886)  his  hero  feels  that  "he  has  failed  in  ac- 
tion in  leaving  a  great  responsibility  to  chance,"  and  recog- 
nises that  his  misfortunes  "  have  come  from  his  lack  of 
will,"  —  words  that  probe  the  ulcer  of  the  neuropathic  cul- 
ture of  his  generation. 

From  Pascal  Gafosse  (1887)  onward,  action  becomes 
more  and  more  the  motive  power  of  Margueritte's  fiction. 
He  says  here  that  naturalism,  as  he  had  at  first  conceived 
it,  is  "  a  form  of  decadence,  base  and  vulgar."  There  is 
still  over  much  revery  and  crudity,  too,  but  the  tonic  moral 
of  this  book  is  Work.  And  in  Days  of  Trial  (Jours 
d'6preuve,  1889,  written  in  1886)  there  is  the  same  forti- 
fying lesson,  a  lesson  that  none  in  France  to-day  teaches 
with  such  power  except  Zola,  and  none  with  such  confi- 
dence. This  study  of  the  humbler  aspects  of  bourgeois 
life,  of  "  lowly  happiness,  narrow,  resigned,  but  sure," 
breathes  a  spirit  of  deep  compassion  and  yet  of  valorous 
hope.  It  is  not  only  a  good  book,  but  in  spite  of  all  its 
crudities,  it  is  a  good  book,  a  tonic  to  the  will  that  sets  the 
nerves  vibrating  with  the  need  of  action. 

The  doctrine  of  The  Force  of  Environment  (la  Force 


382      A  Century  of  French  Fiction 

des  choses,  1891)  is  at  first  not  quite  so  clear,  but  as  we 
look  more  nearly  we  see  that  here  it  is  our  will-not-to-do 
that  is  forced  by  life  into  action,  that  it  is  not  well  that  love 
should  clasp  grief  forever,  or  that  sin  should  demand  a  long 
repentance,  that  humanity  claims  us  from  ourselves  for  its 
good  and  ours ;  and  so  this  book  is  neither  fatalistic  nor 
pessimistic,  but  the  trumpet  of  the  triumph  of  life,  of  the 
germinal  forces  in  our  human  nature. 

In  this  direction  Over  the  Crest  (Sur  le  retour,  1892) 
marks  no  advance.  But  the  hero  is  still  the  human  will, 
this  time  in  a  man  passed  middle  age  conquering  a  late- 
born  love  with  a  chaste  and  vigorous  reason.  The  book 
shows  less  crudity  of  expression  than  any  that  had  pre- 
ceded. It  is  clean,  but  it  is  sombre  and  ill  constructed. 
Nor  is  there  reason  to  dwell  at  length  on  the  novels  of  the 
next  four  years,  —  TJie  Whirlwind  (la  Tourmente),  Ma 
Grande f  Save  Honour  (Fors  I'honneur),  and  The  Flight 
(I'Essor),  —  except  to  note  that  there  is  growing  delicacy 
and  tenderness,  and  the  same  grave,  strong,  simple  sincerity. 
Nor  is  it  necessary  to  speak  of  the  short  stories  of  these 
years  gathered  in  Lovers  and  in  The  White  Cuirassier^  for 
all  his  art  and  all  his  moral  power  is  concentrated  in  The 
Disaster  (le  Desastre,  1897),  written  in  collaboration  with 
his  brother  Victor,  a  story  of  the  fall  of  Metz  in  that  wax 
with  Prussia  in  which  their  father  met  a  glorious  death. 
Zola's  Downfall  alone  in  France  can  compare  with  this 
picture  of  war.  His  is  the  more  artistic  book,  but  it  is  also 
the  more  gloomy.  Both  are  patriotic,  but  this  is  the  more 
tonic  and  inspiring,  tempering  the  mind  to  hardness  in  that 
military  school  of  whose  "  servitude  and  grandeur  "  Vigny 
had  written  so  nobly.  There  is  here  a  virile  grappling  with 
the  problems  of  duty,  a  power  of  moral  self-control  and 


The  Generation  of  the  Second  Empire  383 

abnegation,  that  the  authors  inherited  from  General  Mar- 
gueritte  as  the  most  precious  of  his  legacies.  It  means 
that  there  is  iron  yet  in  the  culture,  as  there  has  ever  been 
in  the  heart  of  France,  that  in  Hterature  also  there  is  a  sav- 
ing remnant  to  whom  war  has  taught  endurance,  solidarity, 
heroism,  in  whom  the  example  of  the  dead  has  strengthened 
the  living.  The  book  is  a  noble  tribute  of  a  son  to  a  father 
and  of  a  patriot  to  his  country.  Among  the  dilettants  of 
Christianity  and  Symbolism  and  Psychology  and  the  cultus 
of  the  Ego  and  of  Decadence,  of  mysticism  and  paganism 
and  pessimism,  it  is  refreshing  to  come  upon  a  man  at  last 
on  whom  may  fall  the  mantle  of  Zola,  with  as  noble  a  pur- 
pose and  a  clearer  moral  vision. 


Index 

Containing  authors  and  titles  of  French  fiction  in  the  nineteenth  cen- 
tury only.  Names  are  alphabetised  after  omission  of  de.  Titles 
are  entered  without  their  initial  articles,  and  in  their  French  form 
only.     Each  title  is  followed  by  the  author's  name  in  parentheses. 


Abandonn6  (Maupassant),  359. 

Abb6  Aubain  (M6rimee),  199. 

Abb6  Constantin  (Halevy),  327. 

Abbesse  de  Castro  (Stendhal),  41. 

Abb6  Tigrane  (Fabre),  337-8,  339. 

About ^  262,  279. 

Accident  de  M.  Hubert  (Hennique),  34J 

Adam,  Mme.,  336. 

Adieu  (Balzac),  100,  104,  168,  176. 

Adolphe  (Constant),  21,  28,  29,  281. 

Affaire  Clemenceau  (Dumas  fils),  280. 

Affaire  Lerouge  (Gaboriau),  328. 

Aim6  (Richepin),  334. 

A  la  Salpetrifere  (Daudet),  374. 

Albert  Savarus  (Balzac),  147,  148. 

Alexis,  341. 

Amants  (Margueritte),  382. 

Ames  du  purgatoire  (Merimee),  193. 

Amour  d'automne  (Theuriet),  329. 

Andr6  (Sand),  227. 

Andr6  Corn61is  (Bourget),  369. 

Andre  le  Savoyard  (Kock),  2>^. 

Ane  (Maupassant),  359. 

Ange  Pitou  (Dumas  p^re),  70,  72. 

Aphrodite  (Louys),  336. 

Apostrophe  (Balzac),  no. 

A  rebours  (Huysmans),  343-4. 

Arlne,  329. 

Aristide  Froissart  (Gozlan),  84. 

Argent  (Zola),  291,  302. 

Armance  (Stendhal),  34-5,  39,  42. 

Armature  (Hervieu),  ^j^. 


Arria  Marcella  (Gautier),  2r3,  215,217. 
Arsene  Guillot  (Merim6e),  196-8. 
Arthur  (Daudet),  311. 
Assassin  (Claretie),  330. 
Assommoir  (Zola),  267, 285,  290,  294-6, 

297,  298,  299,  342. 
Astre  noir  (L.  Daudet),  374. 
Atala  (Chateaubriand),  i,  4,  5,  13,  21, 

67,  116,  220. 
Atta  Gull  (Sue),  81. 
Attaque  du  moulin  (Zola),  288. 
Auberge  rouge  (Balzac),  104-5,  1^6. 
Au  bonheur  des  dames  (Zola),  291,  299. 
Aurevilly,  S7,  334. 
Autre  6tude  de  ferame  (Balzac),  114, 

143,  144,  149- 

Automne  d'une  femme  (Provost),  378-9. 

Autour  d'une  source  (Droz),  327. 

Autour  du  mariage  (Gyp),  367. 

Aux  bois  (Maupassant),  358. 

Aux  champs  (Maupassant),  359. 

Avatar  (Gautier),  212,  217. 

Aventure  de  Mile,  de  St.-Alais  (Rabus- 
son),  373. 

Aventure  du  dernier  Abenoerage  (Cha- 
teaubriand), 4,  13. 

A  vau  I'eau  (Huysmans),  343. 

Aziyad6  (Loti),  363,  364. 

Bac  (Daudet),  311. 

Baccara  (Malot),  327. 

Bal  de  Sceaux  (Balzac),  99. 


25 


386 


Index 


Balthasar  (France),  335. 

Balzac,  31,  36,  39,  42,  43,  44,  48,  82, 
86,  88-186,  187,  205,  217,  219,  227, 
229,  230,  238,  239,  242,  265,  273,  283, 

299.  3oi»  310.  323.  329*  339- 
Banville,  262,  265,  280,  356. 
Bapteme  (Maupassant),  358. 
Barbier  de  Paris  (Kock),  83. 
Barrhs,  374-7. 

Batard  de  Maul^on  (Dumas  pfere),  72. 
Baudelaire,  281. 
Beatrix  (Balzac),  126,  139,  140-1,  142, 

147,  154. 
Bel-Ami  (Maupassant),  351-2,  353. 
Belle  Imperia  (Balzac),  no. 
Belle  Imp6ria  marine  (Balzac),  112. 
Belle  journ6e  (C6ard),  341. 
Belot,  281. 
Bentzon,  Mme.,  330. 
Bernard,  69,  85,  86. 
Berthe  la  repentie  (Balzac),  in,  112. 
Bete  humaine  (Zola),  290,  297,  301. 
Bex,  see  Rosny. 
Beyle,  see  Stendhal. 
Blanc,  see  Bentzon. 
Blancs  et  les  bleus  (Dumas  pfere),  72, 

75- 
Boh^miens  (M^rim^e),  200. 
Boisgobey^  328. 
Bol  de  punch  (Gautier),  205. 
Bonnet  de  la  marine  (Mendes),  -^2)1- 
Bons  proupos  des  religieuses  de  Poissy 

(Balzac),  in. 
Boule  de  suif  (Maupassant),  348,  350, 

355,  356,  359- 
Bourgeois  de  Molinchart  (Champfleury) 

273- 
Bourget,  31,  39,  42,  242,  270,  334,  349, 

362,  367-72,  373,  374- 
Bourse  (Balzac),  108,  114. 
Bouvard  et  P6cuchet  (Flaubert),  246, 

259,  260. 
Brada,  377. 
Bug-Jargal  (Hugo),  51-2,  53,  54. 

Cabinet  des  antiques  (Balzac),  131, 135, 
137,  143- 


Qa  Ira  (Maupassant),  358. 
Canne  de  jonc  (Vigny),  62. 
Capitaine  Fracasse  (Gautier),  55,  214, 

215-7. 
Carmen   (M6rim6e),    190,   198-9,   200, 

201. 
Carnet  de  danse  (Zola),  285. 
Cas  de   Mme.  Luneau   (Maupassant), 

359- 
Cath^diale  (Huysmans),  345,  346,  347. 
Ceard,  341. 
Cecile(Sue),  81. 
Celle-ci  ou  celle-lk  (Gautier),  205. 
Celle  qui  m'aime  (Zola),  286. 
C^sar  Birotteau  (Balzac),  92,  119,  136- 

7,  155- 
Chaine  d'or  (Gautier),  211. 
Chali  (Maupassant),  358. 
Chambre  bleue  (M^rimee),  200. 
Champfleury,  170,  262,  265,  273,  340. 
Chandelier  (Nodier),  50. 
Chansons  de  Bilitis  (Louys),  336. 
Chapelle  d'Ayton  (Mme.  Meulan),  25. 
Charles  Demailly  (Goncourt),  263,  264- 

5,  268. 
Chartreuse  de  Parme  (Stendhal),  33,  34, 

39-41,  42. 
Chasseur  vert  (Stendhal),  34,  41,  42. 
Chateaubriand,  1-17,  24,  30,  33,   35, 

46,  47,  49,  50,  51,  61,  83,  154,    155, 

222,  253,  259. 
Chatrain,  262,  273,  274. 
Chef  d'oeuvre  inconnu   (Balzac),   104^ 

136,  142,  210,  301. 
Cherbuliez,  262,  278-9. 
Cherie  (Goncourt),  270-1. 
Chevalier  d'Harmental  (Dumas  p^re), 

1^^  74,  75- 
ChevaUer  de  la  Maison-Rouge  (Dumas 

pere),  72. 
Chien-Caillou  (Champfleury),  273. 
Chien  de  Brisquet  (Nodier),  50. 
Chiere  nuict6e  d'amour  (Balzac),  in. 
Chimferes  de  Marc  Lepraistre  (Rabus- 

son),  373. 
Chonchette  (Prevost),  377-8. 
Chouans  (Balzac),  94-5,  145. 


Index 


387 


Chronique  du  rhgne  de   Charles    IX. 

(M6rim6e),  188,  189-90. 
Cinq-Mars  (Vigny),  47,  60,  61-2,  190. 
C/ade/,  82,  333. 
Claretie,  267,  326,  330. 
Claude  Gueux  (Hugo),  53. 
Clochette  (Maupassant),  358. 
Club  des  hachichiens  (Gautier),  214. 
Coco  (Maupassant),  359. 
Cceur  de  femme  (Bourget),  371. 
Coeur  simple  (Flaubert),  258,  260. 
Collier  de  la  reine  (Dumas  pfere),  72. 
Colomba  (Merim6e),    190,  194-6,  198, 

201. 
Colonel  Chabert  (Balzac),  108. 
Com6diens  sans  le  savoir  (Balzac),  154, 

158. 
Comment  feut  basti  le  chasteau  d'Azay 

(Balzac),  iii. 
Comment  la  belle  fille  de  Portillon,  etc. 

(Balzac),  112. 
Compagnon    de   la    Tour    de    France 

(Sand),  227,  228. 
Compagnons  de  J6hu   (Dumas  pfere), 

72. 
Comte  Kostia  (Cherbuliez),  279. 
Comtesse  de   Chamy   (Dumas   p^re), 

72. 
Comtesse  de  Rudolstadt  (Sand),  228. 
Confession  de  Claude  (Zola),  286. 
Confession  d'un  amant  (Pr6vost),  37S. 
Confession  d'un  enfart  du  si^cle  (Mus- 

set),  45,  63,  64. 
Confession    posthume    (Margueritte), 

Connestable  (Balzac),  no. 

Conquete  de  Plassans  (Zola),  291,  293. 

Conscience  (Malot),  327. 

Conscrit  de  1813  (Erckmann-Chatrian), 

274. 
Constant,  21,  23,  27,  281. 
Consuelo  (Sand),  228. 
Contes  k  Ninon  (Zola),  285. 
Contes  drolatiques    (Balzac),   90,   92, 

104,   107,    108,    109-112,   lis,    136, 

142,  172. 
Contes  du  lundi  (Daudet),  307,  311. 


Contradictions  (Mme.  Meulan),  25. 
Contrat  de  mariage  (Balzac),  108,  127, 

128,  132,  134. 
Co//>Se,  330-1,  334,  356. 
Corinne   (Stael),    17,    18,    19,   22,  23, 

24,  220. 
Cosmopolis  (Bourget),  371-2. 
Cottin,  Mme.,  25,  26. 
Coucher  de  soleil  (Coppee),  330. 
Coup  de  pistolet  (M6rimee),  200. 
Coup  d'etat  (Maupassant),  359. 
Courbezons  (Fabre),  337,  338,  339. 
Cousine  Bette  (Balzac),  148, 158,  160-2, 

163,  172,  177,  183. 
Cousine  Laure  (Prevost),  378. 
Cousin  Pons  (Balzac),  135,   153,  158, 

159,  161,  162-3,  177,  183,  184. 
Crime  d'amour  (Bourget),  369. 
Crime  de  Sylvestre  Bonnard  (France), 

334- 
Criquette  (Hal6vy),  327. 
Croisilles  (Musset),  65. 
Cruelle  enigme  (Bourget),  369. 
Cuirassier  blanc  (Margueritte),  382. 
Cur^  d'Azay  (Balzac),  no. 
Cure  de  Cucignan  (Daudet),  311. 
Cure  de  Tours  (Balzac),  113,  114,  134. 
Cure  de    village    (Balzac),   118,    139, 

140,  144. 
Curee  (Zola),  291,  292,  295,  317. 
Cy  est  demonstr6  que  la  Fortune  est 

tousiours  femelle  (Balzac),  112. 

Dame  aux  cam61ias  (Dumas  fils),  280, 

360. 
Dame  aux  perles  (Dumas  fils),  2S0. 
Dame  de   Monsoreau    (Dumas  pere), 

72. 
Dame  de  pique  (M6rim6e),  199. 
Daniel  Jovard  (Gautier),  205. 
Daniella  (Sand),  235. 
Dangler  d'estre  trop  coquebin  (Balzac), 

III. 
Daudet,  A.,   54,  260,    261,   269,   293, 

305-325,  326,  331,  341,  355,  356. 
Daudet,  Mme.  A.,  309,  374. 
Daudet,  E.,  305. 


388 


Index 


Daudet^  Z,.,  320. 

Debacle  (Zola),  290,  295,  302,  382. 

Debut  dans  la  vie  (Balzac),  108,  148. 

Decor6  (Maupassant),  358. 

D6  d'argent  (Copp6e),  330. 

Delphine  (Stael),  17,  18,  19,  20,  21,  23, 

25,  28,  49. 
Demi-vierges  (Pr6vost),  379. 
Denis  (Maupassant),  358. 
D6put6  d'Arcis  (Balzac),  155,  158-9. 
D6racin6s  (Barrfes),  ^^tj. 
Dernier  chapitre  de  mon  roman  (No- 

dier),  49,  50. 
Derni^re  Aldini  (Sand),  227. 
Dernifere  classe  (Daudet),  311. 
Derniferes  lettres  de  femmes  (Provost), 

378. 
Demi^res  nouvelles  (M6rim6e),  190. 
Dernier  jour  d'un  condamn6  (Hugo),  53. 
Demiers  br^tons  (Souvestre),  84. 
D6sastre  (Margueritte),  380,  382-3. 
D^sesp6rance  d'amour  (Balzac),  iii. 
Deux  amis  (Maupassant),  360. 
Deux  auberges  (Daudet),  311. 
Deuxifeme  amour  (Bourget),  369. 
Deux  mattresses  (Musset),  65. 
Deux  reves  (Balzac),  99,  loi. 
Diable  (Maupassant),  359. 
Diaboliques  (Aurevilly),  %t. 
Diamant  et  une  vengeance  (Penchet), 

79- 
Diane  de  Lys  (Dumas  fils),  280. 
Dilemme  (Huysmans),  344. 
Diligence  de  Beaucaire  (Daudet),  311. 
Dires  in  con  grus  (Balzac),  112. 
Disciple  (Bourget),  371. 
Dix  contes  (Lemaitre),  373. 
Djoumane  (M6rini6e),  200. 
Docteur  Pascal  (Zola),  288,  291,  302, 

303-  , 
Domenique  (Fromentin),  273-4. 
Dosia  (Gr6ville),  330. 
Dossier  113  (Gaboriau),  328. 
Double  famille  (Balzac),  99,  113. 
Double  m6prise  (Merimee),  190,  192. 
Drame  au  bord  de   la  mer  (Balzac), 

123,  126. 


Droz^  327. 

Duchesse  de  Langeais  (Balzac),   102, 

119,  121,  122. 
Dudevant,  see  Sand. 
Duguesclin  (Dumas  p^re),  72. 
Dtttnasfils^  262,  279-80. 
Dumas  pire,  44,   68,   69-80,   82,  83, 

168,  182,  216,  219. 
D'ung  justiciard  (Balzac),  in. 
D'ung    pauvre   .   .   .   Vieulx-par-Che- 

mins  (Balzac),  112. 
Durandj  see  Greville. 
Duranty,  340. 
Duras^  Mtne.,  26-7,  35. 

l^douard  (Duras),  26. 

;6ducation  sentimentale  (Flaubert),  58, 

243,  254-6,  257,  259,  298. 
Elixir  de  longuevie  (Balzac),  100,  104. 
Elixir  du  p^re  Gaucher  (Daudet),  309, 

3"- 
Elle  et  lui  (Sand),  21,  227. 
^^motions  de  Polydore  Marasquin  (Goz- 

lan),  84. 
Employes  (Balzac),  131,  135-6,  137. 
^nault,  262,  281. 
En  18-  (Goncourt),  264. 
En  Camargue  (Daudet),  311. 
Enfance     d'une      parisienne      (Mme. 

Daudet),  309. 
Enfant  maudit  (Balzac),  104,  130,  133, 

134. 
Enfants  et  autres  (Mme.  Daudet),  309. 
Enlevement  de  la  redoute  (M6rim6e), 

191. 
En  manage  (Huysmans),342. 
En  mer  (Maupassant),  359. 
Ennemi  des  lois  (Barres),  ^yj. 
En  rade  (Huysmans),  344. 
En  route  (Huysmans),  345-6. 
Ensorcel^e  (Aurevilly),  87. 
Envers    de    I'histoire    contemporaine 

(Balzac),  148, 152,  153, 158, 163,  184. 
^pingle  (Maupassant),  360. 
J^pisode  sous  la  Terreur  (Balzac),  loi, 

104. 
Erckmann,  262,  273,  274. 


Index 


389 


Essor  (Margueritte),  382. 

Estaunie^  y]"]. 

J^toiles  (Daudet),  311. 

Etude  de  femrae  (Balzac),  97. 

j^tui  de  nacre  (France),  335. 

Eug6nie  Grandet  (Balzac),  89,  97,  103, 

119,  120-1,  124,  133,  160,  177,  180. 
:^vangeliste    (Daudet),    269,    319-20, 

322,  323. 
Exilees  de  Siberie  (Cottin),  25. 
Exiles  (Balzac),  104. 

Fabre,  262,  326,  329,  337-40. 

Facino  Cane  (Balzac),  132. 

Famille  Cardinal  (Halevy),  327. 

Fanny  (Feydeau),  281. 

Faulse  courtisane  (Balzac),  iii. 

Fausse  maitresse  (Balzac),  144,  146-7. 

Faustin  (Goncourt),  270. 

Faute  de  l'abb6   Mouret  (Zola),  2S4, 

29 1 »  293,  294,  295. 
Federigo  (M6rimee),  191. 
Fedor  (Daudet),  322,  323. 
Fee  amoureuse  (Zola),  285. 
Fee  aux  miettes  (Nodier),  50. 
Femme  abandonnee  (Balzac),  112, 113, 

151. 
Femme  de  trente  ans   (Balzac),   104, 

no,  112,  121,  133,  151,  180. 
Fenime-enfant  (Mendes),  333. 
Femmes  d'artistes  (Daudet),  311. 
Ferragus  (Balzac),  117. 
Feuillet,  233,  262,  274-8, 347,  367,  Z7Z, 

378. 
Feval,  262. 
Feydeau,  262,  281. 
Figures    et    choses,   etc.  (Loti),   364, 

366.^ 
Filandiere  (Balzac),  109. 
Fille    aux    yeux    d'or    (Balzac),    100, 

126-7,  128,  134. 
Fille  d'Eve  (Balzac),  137,  138. 
Fille  de  tristesse  (Copp6e),  330. 
Fille  du  regent  (Dumas),  72. 
Fille  !]^lisa  (Goncourt),  269,  271,  342. 
Fils  (Maupassant),  360. 
Flaubert,  16,  39,  58,  136,  148,  177,  179, 


187,  188,  224,  238,  239,  242-261, 
262,  265,  273,  274,  289,  298,  306, 
323,  325,  326,  333,  334,  348-9,  350, 
351,  352,361,  365. 

Force  des  choses  (Margueritte),  381-2. 

Fors  I'honneur  (Margueritte),  382. 

Fort  comme    la  mort    (Maupassant), 

354,  379- 

Fortune  des  Rougon  (Zola),  290. 
Fortunio  (Gautier),  206,  207-8,  209. 
Fou  (Maupassant),  360. 
Fou?  (Maupassant),  360. 
Foyer  breton  (Souvestre),  85. 
Prance,  334. 

Francois  le  Champi  (Sand),  229,  230-1. 
Frederic  et  Bernerette  (Musset),  65. 
Fr^re  d'armes  (Balzac),  no. 
Freres  Zemganno  (Goncourt),  270. 
Fromentin,  262,  273. 
Fromont  jeune  et  Risler.ain6  (Daudet), 
312-3,  315,  323- 

Gaboriau,  326,  328. 
Gaietes  champetres  (Janin),  84. 
Gambara  (Balzac),  104,  136,  142,  182. 
Gaudissart  II.  (Balzac),  154,  158. 
Gautier,  45,  48,  55,  75,  104,  141,  169, 

173,  182,  201,  202-218,  264,  265,  280, 

281,  333- 
Gay,  Delphine,  2.(i,  loi. 
Gay,  Sophie,  26,  loi,  102. 
George  Sand,  see  Safid. 
Germinal   (Zola),   261,   267,   290,  295, 

299-301,  302. 
Germinie   Lacerteux   (Goncourt),  260, 

266-8,  269,  270,  289,  294,  314. 
Glouvet,  326,  329. 
Gobseck  (Balzac),  97,  98,  99,  107. 
Goncourt  {frlres),  152,  255,  260,  262, 

263-273,   298,    320,   326,   2>Zl^   342, 

355,  365,  380. 
Gozlan,  84. 

Grand  bretfeche  (Balzac),  108,  114,  149. 
Graziella  (Lamartine),  66,  67. 
Grecque  (Mme.  Adam),  336. 
Grenadiere    (Balzac),   112,    113,    133, 
151. 


390 


Index 


Greville^  326,  330. 

Gustave  le  mauvais  sujet  (Kock),  83. 

Gyp,  356,  362,  366,  367. 

Halevy,  327-8,  356. 

Han  d'Islande  (Hugo),  47,  52-3,  59,  84. 

Haute  (Lavedan),  366. 

Hautot  p^re  et  fils  (Maupassant),  359. 

Hennique,  341. 

Henriette  (Copp^e),  330. 

Heritage  (Maupassant),  358. 

H^ritier  du  diable  (Balzac),  no. 

H6rodias  (Flaubert),  258-9. 

Hervieu,  373. 

Histoire  des  treize  (Balzac),  122. 

Histoire  d'une  fiUe  de  ferme  (Maupas- 
sant), 359. 

Histoire  d'une  parisienne  (Feuillet), 
277. 

Histoires  extraordinaires  de  Poe  (Bau- 
delaire), 281. 

Homme  d'affaires  (Balzac),  158. 

Homme  libre  (Barr^s),  374,  375,  376. 

Homme  qui  rit  (Hugo),  56,  59. 

Honneur  d'artiste  (Feuillet),  277. 

Honorine  (Balzac),  150. 

Horla  (Maupassant),  355. 

Houssaye,  85,  265. 

Hugo,  16,  30,  44,  47,  48,  51-60,  64,  76, 
80,  82,  loi,  164,  173,  174,  177,  182, 
185,  204,  205,  216,  218,  229,  239, 
242,  244,  259,  267,  283,  316,  350. 

Hussar  (Merimee).  200. 

Huysmans,  54,  261,  270,  306,  341-7, 
372,  377,  380. 

Ideas  du  colonel  (Maupassant),  358. 
Idylle  tragique  (Bourget),  372. 
Illusions   perdues  (Balzac),    loi,    117, 

119,   i3i»  nSi   142,   143?   151.   i59> 

265. 
Illustre  Gaudissart  (Balzac),  121. 
Immortel  (Daudet),  321,  324. 
Impressions  de  voyage  (Dumas  pfere), 

73- 
Imprudence  (Maupassant),  359. 
Indiana  (Sand),  19,  85,  223-4,  226. 


Interdiction     (Balzac),     108,      131-2, 

138-9. 
Inutile  beauts  (Maupassant),  354. 
Irreparable  (Bourget),  368-9. 
Isabelle  de  Bavibre  (Dumas  p^re),  71, 

72. 

Jack  (Daudet),  307,  311,  313-5,  318. 

Jacques  (Sand),  226,  235,  236. 

Janin,  69,  74,  84,  205,  264. 

Jardin  de  B6r6nice  (Barr^s),  374,  375. 

Jardin  secret  (Pr6vost),  379-80. 

Jean  de  la  Roche  (Sand),  232,  233. 

Jean  et  Jeanette  (Gautier),  208. 

Jeanne  (Sand),  229. 

Jean  Sbogar  (Nodier),  50. 

j6rome    Paturel  .  .  .  position  sociale 

(Reybaud),  82. 
J6r6nie  Paturel  .  .•  .  meilleure  repub- 

lique  (Reybaud),  82. 
Jesus-Christ  en  Flan dre  (Balzac),  106-7. 
Jettatura  (Gautier),  212,  213,  214. 
Jeunes-France  (Gautier),  205,  216,  280. 
Jeune  Siberienne  (Maistre),  25,  29,  86. 
Jeusne  de  Francois  I.  (Balzac),  in. 
Jocaste    et    le  chat  maigre  (France), 

334. 
Joie  de  vivre  (Zola),  290,  298,  299. 
Joseph  (Maupassant),  359. 
Joseph  Balsamo  (Dumas  p^re),  72. 
Journal  d'une  femme  (Feuillet),  275, 

277. 
Jours  d'epreuve  (Margueritte),  381. 
Joyeulsetez  du  roy  Loys  XI.  (Balzac), 

no. 
Juif  errant  (Sue),  68,  82,  113. 
Julia  de  Trecoeur  (Feuillet),  275,  276. 
Justice  (Malot),  327. 

Karr,  69,  85. 
Kock,  69,  83,  86. 
Kriidener,  25. 

O-bas  (Huysmans),  344-5. 
Ladislas  Bolski  (Cherbuliez),  279. 
L^-haut  (Rod),  373. 
Laide  (Mme.  Adam),  336. 


Index 


391 


Laitiere  de  Montfermeil  (Kock),  8^. 

Lamartine,  16,  51,  65-7,  76,  loi,  154, 
I55>  247,  257. 

Lamiel  (Stendhal),  34,  42. 

Laure  d'Estell  (S.  Gay),  26. 

Lavedan,  366-7. 

Legende  de  Julian  I'hospitalier  (Flau- 
bert), 258. 

Legende  de  I'homme  ^  la  cervelle  d'or 
(Daudet),  311. 

Lelia  (Sand),  225,  226,  235. 

Lemaitre^  373. 

Leone  Leoni  (Sand),  226,  227, 

L6onie  de  Montbreuse  (S.  Gay),  26. 

Lepreux  de  la  cite  d'Aoste  (Maistre), 
29. 

Lettres  \  un  absent  (Daudet),  311. 

Lettres  de  femmes  (Prevost),  378,  379. 

Lettres  de  mon  moulin  (Daudet),  307, 
308,  310,  323. 

Ligazix,  m. 

Lit  (Maupassant),  358. 

Livre  de  la  pitie  et  de  la  mort  (Loti), 

364- 
Livre  de  mon  ami  (France),  335. 
Lokis  (M^rim^e),  200,  201. 
Lorgnon  (D.  Gay),  26. 
Loti^  16,  54,  362-6. 
Louis  Lambert  (Balzac),  91,  104,  108, 

114-5,  "6,  121,  184,  i85. 
Lourdes  (Zola),  302-3. 
Louys,  336. 

Lucifer  (Fabre),  339-40. 
Lucrezia    Floriani    (Sand),    235,   238, 

379- 
Lucy  (Lamartine),  66. 
Lui  (Maupassant),  361. 
Lys  dans  la  vallee  (Balzac),  96,  121, 

125,  132-3,  135,  153,  174. 
Lys  rouge  (France),  334. 

M acquets  79. 

Madame  Andre  (Richepin),  333. 

Madame  Bovary  (Flaubert),  148,  151, 
224,  243,  245-252,  253,  254,  255, 
257,  259,  260,  267,  273,  289,  340, 
344- 


Madame    Chrysanthfeme    (Loti),    363, 

364- 
Madame  Firmiani  (Balzac),  96,  108. 
Madame  Gervaisais  (Goncourt),  268-9, 

270. 
Madame  Lefebvre  (Maupassant),  359. 
Madame  Paul  (Maupassant)  357,  360. 
Madame  Th^r^e  (Erckmann-Chatrian) 

274. 
Madeleine  F^rat  (Zola),  287. 
Mademoiselle  dela  Seigli^re  (Sandeau), 

85. 
Mademoiselle   de    Maupin    (Gautier), 

204,  206-7. 
Mademoiselle  Fifi  (Maupassant),  356, 

360. 
Mademoiselle  Jaufre  (Provost),  378. 
Mademoiselle  la  Quintinie  (Sand),  232, 

233,  234. 
Mademoiselle  Loulou  (Gyp),  367. 
Mademoiselle  Merquem  (Sand),  234. 
Mademoiselle  Perle  (Maupassant),  358. 
Ma  Grande  (Margueritte),  382^ 
Mahommet-Fripouille      (Maupassant), 

359. 
Main  gauche  (Maupassant),  360. 
Maison  de  Penarvan  (Sandeau),  85. 
Maison  du  chat-qui-pelote  (Balzac),  98, 

99.  165. 
Maison  Nucingen  (Balzac),  137,  138. 
Maison  Tellier  (Maupassant),  355,  356, 

359- 
Maistre,  25,  29,  86. 
Maitre  Cornelius  (Balzac),  107. 
Maitre  des  forges  (Ohnet),  331. 
Maitres  mosaistes  (Sand),  227. 
Maitres  sonneurs  (Sand),  229,  231. 
Alaizeroy,  366. 

Mai  d' Andre  (Maupassant),  358. 
Malot,  262,  326-7. 
Maman  Nunu  (Copp6e),  330. 
Manette  Salamon  (Goncourt),  268. 
Mannequin  d'osier  (France),  336. 
Marana  (Balzac),  115. 
Mare  au  diable  (Sand),  227,  229,  230, 

231.  234,  235. 
MargueriUe,  362,  377,  380-3. 


392 


Index 


Manage   dans    le    monde    (Feuillet), 

276-7. 
Mariage  de  Gerard  (Theuriet),  329. 
Mariage  de  Loti  (Loti),  194,  363,  364, 

365. 

Marquis  de  Letori^res  (Sue),  81. 

Marquis  de  Pierrerue  (Fabre),  340. 

Marquis  de  Villemer  (Sand),  232-3,  235. 

Marthe  (Huysmans),  342. 

Martyr  calviniste  (Balzac),  135,  145. 

Martyrs  (Chateaubriand),  4,  5,  10,  13, 
15-6,  24,  252,  253. 

Massimilla  Doni  (Balzac),  142,  182. 

Matelot  (Loti),  365. 

Mateo  Falcone  (Merimee),  191. 

Maujbassant,  177,  259,  261,  274,  329, 
341,  348-361,  362,  378,  379,  380. 

Mauprat  (Sand),  224,  227. 

Medaille  (Copp6e),  330. 

M^decin  de  campagne  (Balzac),   102, 
116,  117-9,  120,  125,  140,  176. 

Meditations  d'uu  cloitre  (Nodier),  49. 

Melmoth  r^concili^  (Balzac),  123,  126. 

M^moires  de  deux  jeunes  marines  (Bal- 
zac), 125,  131,  144, 146, 150, 154, 186. 

M^moires  du  diable  (Mery),  68,  84. 

M^moires  d'un  m6decin  (Dumas  p^re), 

75- 
Manage  de  garden,  see  Rabouilleuse. 
Mendls,  333. 

Mensonges  (Bourget),  370-1,  372. 
Menuet  (Maupassant),  357,  358. 
Mere  Sauvage  (Maupassant),  360. 
Merimee^  29,  42,  45,  80,  177,  187-202. 

368. 
Merle  blanc  (Musset),  65. 
Mery,  83. 

Mes  paysans  (Cladel),  333. 
Message  (Balzac),  108,  149. 
Messe  d'ath^e  (Balzac),  131. 
Meta  Holdenis  (Cherbuliez),  279. 
Meulan,  Mme.,  25. 
Meunier  d'Angibault  (Sand),  26,  228. 
Miarka  (Richepin),  333,  334. 
Michel  Tessier  (Rod),  373. 
Militona  (Gautier),  208. 
Mille  et  deuxieme  nuit  (Gautier),  214. 


Mimi  Pinson  (Musset),  65. 
Mis^rables   (Hugo),  55,   56-8,   59,  60, 

82,  229,  350. 
Miss  Harriet  (Maupassant),  358,  361. 
Miss  Rovel  (Cherbuliez),  279. 
Modeste  Mignon  (Balzac),  153,  154-5. 
Mon  frfere  Ives  (Loti),  363. 
Mon  oncle  Benjamin  (Tillier),  87. 
Mon  oncle  C^Iestin  (Fabre),  337,  ■},-})%■, 

339. 
Monsieur   de  Camors  (Feuillet),  275, 

276. 
Monsieur  et  madame  Cardinal  (Hal6vy)j 

327. 
Monsieur,  madame  et  b^b^  (Droz),  327. 
Monsieur    Parent   (Maupassant),  357, 

360. 
Monte  Cristo  (Dumas  pfere),  68,  74,  75, 

78,  79-80,  82,  282. 
Montolieu,  Mme.,  27. 
Mont-Oriol  (Maupassant),  352-3. 
Morte  (Feuillet),  275,  277,  378. 
Morte  amoureuse  (Gautier),  209,  210- 

II. 
Mortes  bizarres  (Richepin),  333. 
Morticoles  (L.  Daudet),  374. 
Mosaique  (Merimee),  190,  192. 
Mouche  (Musset),  64. 
Moulin  de  Nazareth  (Pr6vost),  379. 
Mule  du  pape  (Daudet),  310. 
Murger,  262,  280-1. 
Muse  du  d^partement   (Balzac),    143, 

144,  150. 
Musset,  45,  48,  63-65,  179,  2x8,  225, 

226,  227,  274. 
Mye  du  roy  (Balzac),  no'. 
Mystferes  de  Marseille  (Zola),  286. 
Mysteres  de  Paris  (Sue),  82,  229. 

Nabab  (Daudet),  307,  311,  313,  315-7, 

318,  319,  323. 
Na'ifvete  (Balzac),  112. 
Nana  (Zola),  162,  267,  290,  297,  370. 
Natchez  (Chateaubriand),  4,  11-13. 
Nid  des  rossignols  (Gautier),  209,  212. 
Nodier,  47,  48-51,  53. 
Nostalgies  de  caserne  (Daudet),  311. 


Index 


393 


Notre  campagne  (Provost),  379. 
Notre  coeur  (Maupassant),  354-5. 
Notre-Dame  (Hugo),  47,  53-5,  56,  58, 

59,  62,  216. 
Nouvelles  g^nevoises  (Topffer),  86,  87. 
Nouvelles  lettres  de  femmes  (Prevost), 

378. 
Nouveaux  pastels  (Bourget),  371. 
Nuit  de  Cliopitre  (Gautier),  211. 
Numa  Roumestan  (Daudet),  307,  308, 

310,  318-9,  323,  324. 

Obermann    (Senancour),    7,    27-8,  29, 

49,  83. 
Oblate  (Huysmans),  346. 
CEuvre  (Zola),  102,  210,  290,  301. 
Ohnet,  278,  326,  331-2. 
Olivier  (Mme.  Duras),  35. 
Omphale  (Gautier),  210. 
Oncle  Jules  (Maupassant),  359. 
Onuphrius  (Gautier),  205. 
Opinions  de  Jerome  Coignard  (France), 

335- 
Orme  du  Mail  (France),  336. 
Ourika  (Mme.  Duras),  26. 

Page  d'amour  (Zola),  232,  291,  297. 

Paienne  (Mme.  Adam),  336. 

Pain  maudit  (Maupassant),  359. 

Paix  de  menage  (Balzac),  98. 

Papa  de  Simon  (Maupassant),  357,  358. 

Parapluie  (Maupassant),  358. 

Parents    pauvres,   see  Cousine  Bstte, 

Cousin  Pons. 
Paris  (Zola),  302-3. 
Partie  de  billard  (Daudet),  311. 
Partie  decampagne  (Maupassant),  359. 
Partie  de  tric-trac  (Merim6e),  192. 
Pascal  Gafosse  (Margueritte),  381. 
Passion  dans  le  d6sert  (Balzac),  100, 

168. 
Pastels,  see  Portraits  de  femmes. 
pates  de  M.  Bonnicar  (Daudet),  311. 
Paysans  (Balzac),  118, 153,  155,  156-8, 

179,229. 
Peau  de  chagrin  (Balzac),   104,   105, 

185. 


Peche  de  M.  Antoine  (Sand),  228. 
Peche  v6niel  (Balzac),  no,  112. 
Pecheur  d'Islande  (Loti),  363,  364. 
Peintre  de  Saltzbourg  (Nodier),  49. 
Penchet^  79. 

P^re  Amable  (Maupassant),  359. 
P^re  Goriot  (Balzac),  121,  124-5,  '54> 

159,  168. 
Perle  de  TolMe  (M6rim6e),  192. 
Perseverance  d'amour  (Balzac),  in. 
Petit  Bob  (Gyp),  367. 
Petit   chien  de  la  marquise  (Gautier), 

212. 

Petit  Chose  (Daudet),  305,  308. 

Petite  comtesse  (Feuillet),  274,  276. 

Petite  Fadette  (Sand),  227,  229,  231. 

Petite  paroisse  (Daudet),  315,  321-2. 

Petite  Roque  (Maupassant),  361. 

Petites  Cardinal  (Halevy),  327. 

Petites  mis^res  de  la  vie  con  jugale  (Bal- 
zac), 143,  158. 

Petit  fut  (Maupassant),  359. 

Petit  soldat  (Maupassant),  360. 

Petit  Stenn  (Daudet),  311. 

Petits  bourgeois  (Balzac),  154,  155-6. 

Peur  (Maupassant),  360. 

Physiologie  dumariage  (Balzac),  96,  97. 

Picciola  (Saintine),  87. 

Pied  de  momie  (Gautier),  213,  215,  217. 

Pierre  et  Jean  (Maupassant),  353,  356. 

Pierre  Grassou  (Balzac),  142,  144. 

Pierrette  (Balzac),  143,  146,  299. 

Pigaiilt-Lebrun^  83,  93. 

Pipe  d'opium  (Gautier),  214. 

Ponson  dti  Terrail,  262,  281,  328. 

Portfeuille  de  Bixiou  (Daudet),  311. 

Portraits  de  femmes  (Bourget)  371. 

Port-Tarascon  (Daudet),  309. 

Pot-bouille  (Zola),  291,  298-9. 

Prevost^  377-80. 

Prince  de  Boheme  (Balzac),  143,  144. 

Prisonniers  (Maupassant),  360. 

Prisonnier  du  Caucasse  (Maistre),  29. 

Promenade  (Maupassant),  360. 

Proscrits  (Nodier),  49. 

Prosne  du  joyeulx  cur^  de  Meudon 
(Balzac),  iii. 


394 


Index 


Prussien  de  B^lisaire  (Daudet),  311, 
Psychologic  de  Tamour  moderne  (Bour- 

get),  370. 
Pucelle  de  Thilhouze  (Balzac),  no. 
Puits  de  Sainte-Claire  (France),  335. 
Pyat,  82. 

Quarante-cinq  (Dumas  p^re),  72,  75, 
Quatre-vingt-treize  (Hugo),  56,  59-60. 
Qui  sait?  (Maupassant),  361. 

Rabou^  155,  159. 

Rabouilleuse  (Balzac),    144,  149,  151, 

160. 
Rabusson,  278,  362,  372. 
Ramuntcho  (Loti),  363,  366. 
Rarahu,  see  Mariage  de  Loti. 
Raphael  (Lamartine),  66-7. 
Recherche  de  I'absolu   (Balzac),  104, 

121,  123. 
Recommencements  (Bourget),  372. 
Regrets  (Maupassant),  358, 
Reine  Margot  (Dumas  pere),  72,  75. 
Religieuse  de  Toulouse  (Janin),  84. 
Remplagant  (Copp6e),  330. 
Rhnusat,  Mme.,  27. 
Ren6  (Chateaubriand),  i,  4,  6,  7,  8-1 1, 

13,  25,  27,  28,  29,  33,  34,  36,  46,  47, 

49i  507  77>^  83,  206,  276. 
Ren^e  Mauperin  (Goncourt),  266. 
R^quisitionnaire  (Balzac),  104. 
Reve  (Zola),  291,  301. 
R6veillon  (Maupassant),  359. 
Reybaud,  82. 
Ricard,  341,  347,  372. 
Richebourg,  328,  332. 
Richepin,  333-4. 
Robert  Helmont  (Daudet),  311. 
Rochers  blancs  (Rod),  yj-t^. 
Rod,  373. 

Roi  Candaule  (Gautier),  211. 
Rois  (Lemaitre),  373. 
Rois  (Maupassant),  360. 
Rois  en  exil  (Daudet),  317-8,  323,  373. 
Romain  Kalbris  (Malot),  327. 
Roman  de  la  momie  (Gautier),  214. 
Roman  du  Chaperon-Rouge  (Daudet), 

306. 


Roman  d'un  enfant  (Loti),  363. 
Roman    d'un    jeune    homme     pauvre 

(Feuillet),  274,  275,  276. 
Roman  d'un  spahi  (Loti),  363,  364. 
Rome  (Zola),  302-3. 
Rose  et  Blanche  (Sand-Sandeau),  223. 
Rose  et  Ninette  (Daudet),  321. 
Rose  rouge  (Dumas  pfere),  'j-X)' 
Rosny,  341,  347,  372. 
Rotisserie     de     la     reine     P6dauque 

(France),  335. 
Rou6s  innocents  (Gautier),  208. 
Rouge  et  le  noir  (Stendhal),  34,  36-9,42. 
Rougon- Macquart  (Zola),  287-302. 
Ruthvven  (Nodier),  50. 

Sabots  (Maupassant),  359. 

Sac  au  dos  (Huysmans),  342. 

Sacrifice  (Rod),  373. 

Sacs  et  parchemins  (Sandeau),  85. 

Saint  (Bourget),  371,  372. 

Saint-Antoine  (Maupassant),  360. 

Sainte-Beuve,  48,  60,  63. 

Saint ine,  87. 

Salammbd  (Flaubert),  252-254,  257. 

Samuel  Brohl  et  cie  (Cherbuliez),  279. 

Sand,  George,  16,  44,   46,  48,  65,  85, 

101,    169,    187,    208,   219-24T,    274, 

329*  37^,  379. 
Sandeau,  85,  89,  223. 
San  Francisco  a  Ripa  (Stendhal),  41. 
Sans  famille  (Malot),  327. 
Sarrasine  (Balzac),  100,  126,  168. 
Sapho  (Daudet),  320-1. 
Sauv6e  (Maupassant),  359. 
Scorpion  (Provost),  ^77' 
Scruple  (Bourget),  372. 
Secret  de    la  princesse  de    Cadignan 

(Balzac),  40,  142. 
Secret  des  Ruggieri  (Balzac),  135,  146. 
Senancour,  27. 
S6raphita  (Balzac),  119,  121,  123,125, 

128-9,  132,  I34>  ^72,  184,  185,  217. 
S^r^nus  (Lemaitre),  373. 
Servitude      et      grandeur     militaires 

(Vigny),  60,  62-3,  382. 
Sibylle  (Feuillet),  233,  276. 


Index 


395 


Siege  de  Berlin  (Daudet),  311. 
Silvestre,  333. 
Smarra  (Nodier),  50. 
Soeur  Beatrix  (Nodier),  50. 
Soeur  Philom^ne  (Goncourt),  265-6. 
ScEurs  Rondoli  (Maupassant),  359,  361. 
Sceurs  Vatard  (Huysmans),  342. 
Soirees  de   Medan  (Zola,   etc.),    288, 

341,  350- 
Solitude  (Maupassant),  360. 
Son  Excellence  Eugene  Rougon  (Zola), 

291,  293. 
Sorcieres  espagnoles  (M^rim6e),  192. 
Soulie,  69,  80,  84. 
Sous  la  table  (Gautier),  205. 
Sous  les  tilleuls  (Karr),  85. 
Sous  rceil  des  barbares  (Barr^s),  374. 
Soutien  de  famille  (Daudet),  321,  322. 
Souvestre,  69,  84. 
Spiridion  (Sand),  228. 
Spirite  (Gautier),  214,  217-8. 
Splendeurs  et  misferes  des  courtisanes 

(Balzac),    no,    117,    137,   138,   148, 

15I)  152,  i53>  156,  158,  159-60,  161. 
Sia'el,  Mme.,  17-24,  49,  62,  83,  240. 
Stello  (Vigny),  60,  62. 
Stendhal,  2,o-^2>i  44,  "5»  142,  155,  179, 

187,  253,  347. 
Succube  (Balzac),  iii,  112. 
5w^,  68,  69,  80-S2,  Zt,^  117,  168,  205, 

208,  229. 
Sur  Catherine  de  M6dicis  (Balzac),  100, 

107,  i3o>  i35»  144,  H5- 
Sur  le  moyne  Amador  (Balzac),  in. 
Sur  le  retour  (Margueritte),  382. 
Sylviane  (Fabre),  338. 

Tamango  (M^rim^e),  191. 

Tartarin  de  Tarascon   (Daudet),  307, 

309-10,  3"»  318,  319,  323,  324- 
Tartarin  sur  les  Alpes  (Daudet),  309, 

321. 
Tenebreuse  affaire  (Balzac),  108,  144, 

145. 
Teneur  de  livres  (Daudet),  311. 
Tentation  de  Saint  Antoine  (Flaubert), 

256-8. 


Terre  (Zola),  119,  157,  289,  295,  297, 

301. 
Terre  promise  (Bourget),  372. 
Teverino  (Sand),  229. 
Thais  (France),  335. 
Therese  Raquin  (Zola),  163,286,  287. 
Theuriet,  326,  328-9,  330. 
Tillier,  87. 

Toison  d'or  (Gautier),  209. 
Topffer,  86,  87. 

Tourmente  (Margueritte),  382. 
Tous  quatre  (Margueritte),  380-1. 
Travailleurs  de  la  mer  (Hugo),  55,  56, 

58-9. 
Trilby  (Nodier),  50. 
Trio  de  romans  (Gautier),  208. 
Trois  clercs  de  Saint  Nicholas  (Balzac), 

III. 
Trois  contes  (Flaubert),  258-9. 
Trois  dames  de  la  Kasbah  (Loti),  363. 
Trois  mousquetaires  (Dumas  p^re),  62, 

72,  74.  75,  78-9,  80,  282. 
Trois  vilies  (Zola),  288,  302-3,  339. 
Tulipe  noire  (Dumas  p^re),  75. 

Ulbach,  262,  281. 

Ursule  Mirouet  (Balzac),  144,  146,  151, 
185. 

Vagabond  (Maupassant),  359. 
Valentine     (Sand),    224-5,    226,    230, 

235- 
Valerie  (Kriidener),  25. 
ValvMre  (Sand),  236. 
Vase  6trusque  (M6rim6e),  192,  193. 
Vendetta  (Balzac),  99. 
Ventre  de  Paris  (Zola),  290,  292,  343, 

344- 
V^nus  de  Gordes,  287. 
V^nus  d'llle  (M6rimee),  194,  198. 
Verdugo  (Balzac),  97,  98. 
Verne,  282. 

Verrou  (Maupassant),  358. 
Veuve  (Feuillet),  277. 
Viaud,  see  Loti. 
Vicaire  des  Ardennes  (Balzac),  93. 


396 


Index 


Viccolo   di    Madama   Lucrezia  (M6ri- 

mee),  198. 
Vicomte  de  Bragelonne  (Dumas  p^re), 

72,  75,  79. 
Victimes  d'amour  (Malot),  326. 
Vie  (Maupassant),  350-2. 
Vie  i  vingt  ans  (Dumas  fils),  280. 
Vie  de  Boh  erne  (Murger),  280-1. 
Vieille  fiUe   (Balzac),    114,    130,    134, 

137-8. 
Vieux  (Daudet),  311. 
Vieux  (Loti),  365. 
Vieux  Bias  (Mend^s),  333. 
yi£7ty,  16,  30,  44,  45,  48,  60-3,  64,  80, 

2i8,  382. 
Ville  noire  (Sand),  232. 
Vingt  ans  apr&s  (Dumas  pfere),  72,  75, 

79. 
Vision  de  Charles  XI.  (M6rim6e),  192. 


Vceu  d'une  morte  (Zola),  286. 

Volupte  (Sainte-Beuve),  63. 

Voyage     autour      de     ma      chambre 

(Maistre),  29. 
Voyageuses  (Bourget),  372. 

Walter  Schnaffs  (Maupassant),  360. 
Wildmanstadius  (Gautier),  205. 

Yvette  (Maupassant),  359,  361. 

Z.  Marcas  (Balzac),  143,  144. 

Zo/a,  31,  39,  42,  54,  89,  104,  119,  IS7, 
162,  163,  174,  178,  229,  232,  243, 
255,  259,  260,  262,  267,  269,  271, 
277,  283-304,  305,  316,  322,  323, 
324,  325,   326,   327,  331,   336,  339^ 

341,  342,  349,  352,  370,  374,  377, 
380,  381,  382,  383. 


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